Grim and Darling
by Honeybeemeadows
Summary: Every town has a tragedy. Every tragedy has a devil. That's me.
1. Chapter 1

**PROLOGUE**

The first time I died, I was fourteen.

I don't mean literally.

It's not like they pumped me full of formaldehyde. Not like they put me in my one good dress, the blue one with the lace around the hem and the patched-up hole under the armpit. It's not like they curled my hair or slathered me in makeup or finally pierced my ears.

I didn't get the velvet-lined coffin. I didn't get the headstone. I didn't get the maggots.

This death, the figurative kind, was worse than all of that.

There's nothing quite like becoming the town ghost, especially when you're still alive.

* * *

The second time I died, I was seventeen.

And it was for real.

 **AN:**

 **This is for Hadley.**

She is my sun, moon, and stars.

This story is also being posted on my blog.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time I turned fourteen, it was a joke.

The sleepwalking.

The first time it happened, it scared me. Five years old, I woke up in the front yard in nothing but my princess pajamas, knee-deep in snow. It was dark and freezing and dead silent. My fingers were numb. My toes were blue, and I couldn't feel my knees. There was something getting into the trash can at the end of the driveway, its eyes glowing neon through the dark, staring right at me, and I was so scared and so cold that my tears froze to my face before I got back inside.

I didn't tell anyone. Mostly because I wasn't sure at all what had happened, but partly because I didn't know how I'd gotten all the way out of bed and down the stairs without tripping on the third step, the one with the loose nail and the creaky board.

I always tripped there.

The next time, it wasn't quite as scary, but I still kept it to myself. Who wakes up in the front seat of the family car with the keys in their hand and their tiptoes barely reaching the gas? Certainly not the average six-year-old. I couldn't even see over the steering wheel. I don't know what my brain was thinking, don't know where it thought it was going. I had been dreaming of the desert, the kind where the trees turn to rock, and the sand turns to sky, so maybe I was going there.

By the time I was fourteen, there was no more hiding it. I was going too far. Too often. Too publicly. The whole thing had become a joke. I was front page news more often than Ralph, the town drunk, who had a penchant for stripping naked and high-stepping the streets in his birthday suit. I was more entertaining than the Mitchells, the couple over on Third Avenue who'd gotten married and divorced and remarried more times than anyone could remember to count. I was the little pin at the center of the gossip mill, the talk of the town, the ever updating sitcom.

Bella Swan, in shorts and an old tank top, flat on her back in the middle of the football field.

Bella Swan, in sweats and a sports bra, standing spread-eagled on the steps of the library.

Bella Swan, in her underwear and nothing else, nearly three miles out of town, tiptoeing the yellow highway lines like a tightrope.

When Alice went missing, they blamed the sleepwalking.

When Alice went missing, they blamed me.

* * *

It's been three years since Alice went missing, and I know ten things for certain:

 **One**.

I will always surprise myself.

There is no getting the best of me. There is no "one step ahead." No matter what I did to curb myself, no matter how I tried to contain myself or wake myself or stop myself - nothing worked. I locked my bedroom door and nearly broke my leg falling through my second story window instead. I tied my ankle to the bedpost and woke up when it dislocated, limping around for a month before the bruising went away. I rigged the front door up with bells and found them in my fist when I woke up underneath the birch tree at the edge of Ashburn park.

If I ever go to jail, I'll bet I could sleepwalk my way right out of there.

 **Two**.

It's better to be prepared.

I figured this out after I showed up in nothing but my red and white-striped boy underwear in front of the gas station on South and Main last year. I woke up to Tommy Meyers, the sad, dark-haired boy who dropped out of school last year because he knocked up his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, staring at me through the big plate glass window with the phone to his ear and his jaw to his chest. That was when I started wearing sweatpants to bed. I started wearing socks, even though I hated socks. I started wearing a hat because the middle of the night is cold, no matter what time of year. I started wearing gloves. My rain boots. A jacket. I started keeping a five dollar bill in my pocket in case I needed a bus or a pay phone or a bribe to get home.

 **Three**

Forks High School is a cesspool, and I am at the very bottom of the pond. Lower than the math nerds. Lower than the band geeks. Lower than Macy Phillips with her acne and her lazy eye and her one tooth that sticks out at an odd angle and makes all her words come out wonky. I hover somewhere above the creepy dude who sits in his car two blocks away with his dick in his hand watching the kids walk to school, but lower than the janitor.

I am the sleepwalker. The outcast. The girl with the dead sister.

 **Four**

You cannot ignore whispers. They may be soft and spoken behind hands or around corners, behind your back, but you cannot ignore them.

 **Five**.

My mother will send a card at Christmas, and she will call on my birthday, but she won't want to talk to me. My dad will hold the phone to his ear for less than four minutes before he hangs up, and he'll have that same look on his face that he always did when she'd bitten his ear off. He'll avoid my gaze for the rest of the night. He still hasn't told me where she went, but I found a letter under his bed in her shitty handwriting that described a farm with a bunch of people who grow their own food and don't wear clothing and believe that some guy named Rashiki was the second coming of God and would save them from a comet that is going to hit earth in four years.

 **Six**

My father will never be the same. He went from big and burly and bright to utterly wasted in a single afternoon. From loud and boisterous to silent and staring off at nothing, his coffee going cold, the crossword going undone, and the house slowly sinking into the ground. He used to fish. Used to hunt. Used to hike to the tops of the cloud bank mountains. Now, he holds down a spot on the couch, puts in extra hours at work, and turns on football games but doesn't watch them. He investigates lead after lead after lead, and none of them go anywhere.

 **Seven**

The best way to fuck up your family?

Murder your sister. Supposedly.

 **Eight**

No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want to, no matter how you try to push it away or block it out or deny it - you will never, ever, _ever_ , forget the smell of fresh blood.

 **Nine**.

Every town has a tragedy. Every tragedy has a devil.

 **Ten**

That's me.

* * *

AN:

Love makes us do weird things sometimes, and I'm doing this for Hadley.

She fixes my mistakes, and then I tinker around because I can't leave well enough alone - any random mistakes are probably my fault.


	3. Chapter 3

**Dear Self,**

September fourth will be the worst day of your life.

You just won't know it until the next day.

It will start out boring. Alice will wake you at 7:08, which is two hours earlier than you told her to, and she will do it by landing on your face. With her knee. You'll be pretty sure she broke your eye, and your vision will be fuzzy and faded all day. You'll barely be able to breathe through your nose. She will want to play ponies and house and dress up, and you'll end up on the floor of her bedroom with a purple feather boa around your neck, your dead grandmother's mothballed dress over your pajamas, and a splitting headache pounding around in your skull. You'll pretend to drink fake tea and pretend to have a baby named Fred, which will really just be a towel rolled up into the shape of a burrito, and pretend to be entertained by Alice's dance routine to a high-pitched boy band song that you hate.

You will try to get her to listen to the Rolling Stones, to Etta James, to Nirvana, but she'll scrunch her nose and tell you that you're weird and that no one likes your boring music before she switches it back.

When you finally escape Alice to take a shower, you'll slip. You will land on your elbow and twist your ankle and jam the third finger on your right hand. You'll get shampoo in your eyes and nick yourself behind your left knee when you try to shave with your mother's cheap pink plastic razor, turning the drain red. You'll be out of deodorant and have to use your father's, which smells like something moldy, and you'll consider for the hundredth time just chopping all your ridiculous hair off once and for all. You'll even dig out his electric razor, the one he uses when his beard has grown out too far, and you'll turn it on just to listen to the vibrations buzz through the steam.

You'll be too much of a chicken to actually shave your head. You'll put the razor away and brush the knots out of your hair just like you do every day.

Mrs. Hale will drop Rose off at eleven in the morning. Your parents went out of town, but the girls have a sleepover once a month, every month like clockwork, and that night is tonight, come hell or high water. Alice practically threw a shit fit when your mother tried to tell her no, so you stepped in and offered to play the responsible one. You're fourteen, after all, and they're letting you carry a credit card in case of emergencies which means you should be able to watch a couple of kids, no sweat.

Mrs. Hale will stay for seventeen minutes, and she will tell you all about her son, Jasper, who is one grade above you and not nearly as cool as she thinks he is. She'll tell you he's in a band, but really, he plays the accordion with his weird friend Emmett and writes nonsense lyrics about space and black holes and alien life forms on the bathroom walls with grease pencils. She'll tell you that he's on the football team, but he only refills the water bottles and sprays down the jockstraps with watered-down bleach. She'll tell you that he talks about you, and you'll cringe a little on the inside, but you'll smile at her and tell her how nice it is to be talked about.

If only you knew how wrong you were.

When she finally, _finally_ leaves, you'll take the girls and spend nearly two hours destroying the kitchen in an attempt to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch. At one in the afternoon, you'll give up. There will be flour on the ceiling and chocolate chips in every corner, and Alice will have ruined a whole carton of eggs by dropping them one by one into the bowl, without removing the shells first. You'll send the girls into the living room to watch that same godawful Disney movie they've practically burned a hole through while you open the package of pre-made dough. They will be loud, too loud, singing that terrible, horrible song, just the chorus over and over and _over_. They will argue loudly that Rose has to be Anna which means that Alice gets to be Elsa, and there's that fucking song. Again.

It will take twelve minutes for the cookies to bake, and you're so tired from walking all night long, so you will sit at the table and put your head down on the cool blue formica and close your eyes.

Just for a minute.

When you wake up, it will be 2:37 in the morning. You will be lying in a flower bed, half-naked, and there will be blood _everywhere_. Your arms. Your legs. Your hands. It will be in your hair. Your eyelashes. Your mouth. You'll sit there in the grass for half an hour studying the way you've turned into a speckled space of bloody constellations. Into a Pollack painting. Into a gore-laced, connect-the-dots drawing.

If you could say anything to yourself right then, sitting in that flower bed in the middle of the night, covered in blood, it would be "Don't go home."

 _Don't go home._

 _Don't go home._

Whatever you do, _please don't go home_.

 **Sincerely,**

 **Me**

* * *

 **AN:**

There are bright, shiny people in the world. And then there is Hadley Hemingway.

Y'all are gold, but that girl is diamond plated.


	4. Chapter 4

"Hi," I sigh and slump into the kitchen chair across the formica table from my father. Everything is a sigh. Everything is a slump. Every look my father gives me is the same, and today is no different. We sit in the kitchen because neither of us can set foot in the living room. He reads the newspaper because he threw out the television. I still avert my eyes when I pass Alice's bedroom door on the way to my own, and he still averts his eyes when he talks to me.

"Hi, baby girl. How was school?" He asks this with a furrow between his brows and that deep heavy thing beneath his skin that darkens his eyes and deepens his wrinkles. He glances at me and then looks away, like he's trying really hard not to remember something super shitty about me.

I slump further and shrug.

"Fine," I say, even though I mean terrible. Fucking horrible. Intolerable, even though I still tolerate it. I don't have much choice.

"I put some pork in the crock pot this morning." He drops the subject because he knows exactly what school is like for me. I don't know why he won't just let me homeschool. Something about him not being around enough to supervise me, but I think it's because the last time he left me alone and responsible in this house, the unthinkable happened.

"Smells good," I mumble and study the table top. I have it memorized. Every fleck of silver. Every smidge of gold. Three years of afternoons spent studying it means that I could replicate every spot from memory, and there are a million of them.

We sit in silence for half an hour. This is typical.

He finally breaks. "I'm following a lead out of Seattle. A real scumbag with a rap sheet ten miles long. He was in the area that… _day_." He chokes on the end of his sentence like a hard candy cracked suddenly in half and lodged wrong in his windpipe. His face reddens, and the newspaper shakes.

"Oh, yeah? That's good." I try to sound interested, involved, _hopeful_ , but everything is a sigh and a slump, and I can't muster up much beyond basic apathy. He can tell, but he doesn't let on.

"If I can just get a warrant for a DNA test, I may be able to prove something."

My gaze drops even further to the cheap linoleum he plastered over the beautiful hardwood floor. It's white and patterned with ugly square blocks, but it might as well not even be there. I can still see it, the brown and blonde and amber of the wood. The glistening ruby red stain, right there in the middle. It wasn't Alice's blood though, or Rose's. The blood in the kitchen, that was someone else's. It didn't match the girls. Didn't match me.

It's the only thing that kept me out of jail, or juvie, or worse.

Between the black eye Alice gave me that morning and the blood in the bathtub from my misadventures in shaving, I looked suspicious. The fact that I didn't remember anything between falling asleep at this exact spot at the table and waking up somewhere else entirely, I looked like a red-handed homage to guilt. I might as well have marched myself into the cop shop and 'fessed up to something I didn't do. Might as well have lynched myself from the flagpole in the town square for all to see, because they'd basically all decided I was guilty anyway.

I was a murderer. Even though I wasn't.

"Seems like you've been sleeping better lately." Dad breaks the silence like the sledgehammer that he is, no grace, no subtlety. He's always been a wrecking ball. I roll my eyes before I look back at him and try to smile, but it hurts, and I can't keep it up long enough to be convincing.

"Yeah. Sort of." That's a lie. He thinks I'm sleeping better because I haven't been walking, but that's not the truth. I'm not walking because I'm not sleeping. Between a rock and a hard place, between the walking and the sleeping, there is only the slim, unbearable middle.

Insomnia.

It's harder than it looks.

The first few nights were easy, losing myself in a book, then a movie, then Tumblr and Pinterest, and some site dedicated to asshole cats being assholes. The next few nights were a little harder, pinching my arms and thighs and cheeks to stay awake. By now, I'm in tunnel vision mode. Zombieland. Everything outside the small circle right in front of me is meaningless and fuzzy. Out of focus. A blur.

Everything outside is fucked.

* * *

AN:

 **1)** All hail Hadley Hemingway because that girl is GOLD STANDARD.

 **2)** Do you need a warning? Because this is your warning.

No one wants to be soap, and I don't want to write fluff.

 **3)** I have a one year old. Which means no promises on schedule.

Unless it's nap time. Then all promises are etched in stone.


	5. Chapter 5

I don't know much about Alice's disappearance, but I do know a few things:

 **One**.

I know that the lock on the front door had been tampered with, was basically demolished, and there was a shitty rusted screwdriver found underneath the porch.

The police tried to lift prints.

They got nothing.

 **Two.**

I know that there was a size 11½ men's shoe print in the mud at the edge of the yard, facing the house. It was from a Carolina brand boot, the tread worn down more on the outside of the sole than the arch, like someone bearing their weight wrong.

Maybe a back problem. Maybe a bad case of sciatica. Maybe a limp.

 **Three.**

I know that the blood in the kitchen was type B.

 **Four.**

I know that there was a big knife missing from the kitchen. The one with the smooth birchwood handle. The one that my dad liked to descale fish with.

 **Five.**

I know that there was a trail of blood that led from the back door into the forest at the north side of the yard. They brought in dogs. They brought in metal detectors. They did grid searches and even summoned in a lady who claimed she could speak with the dead, but nothing. No knife. No Alice.

Nothing.

 **Six.**

I know that Rose didn't die of blood loss or blunt trauma. There was a bruise an inch thick all around her throat in the shape of two big hands. Her death certificate declared her cause of death as asphyxiation.

 **Seven.**

I know that there wasn't a single trace of Alice. No sign of a struggle. No blood or hair or fingernails popped off in a fight to escape.

 **Eight.**

I know that her body still hasn't been found.

* * *

I am going to solve this shit if it kills me.

It's not that the police aren't doing their job, but they aren't. They aren't doing it well, or at all. It might be because of my dad. They don't want to disappoint their boss or have to break bad news themselves. So they avoid it altogether. It might be because of me, the dead-eyed daughter who watches their every move and asks too many questions they don't have answers for. It might be because of the day my mother drank half a bottle of vodka before she drove down to the station and pitched a screaming, spitting fit at the front desk, then charged the back rooms. She accused all of them of being lazy, worthless assholes who were content to leave her baby girl dead in a ditch somewhere before she stumbled back to the car and hightailed it out of town, never to be seen again.

So, fuck the police.

If it comes down to me, it comes down to me.

I've done a lot of research, most of it in the middle of the night, huddled underneath my covers. It's one thing to wonder about the old lady down the street who sat in her recliner for six days before the postman bothered to look through the front window. Or that tourist from Germany who drove his car off the highway and sat submerged in the Bogachiel River for almost two weeks before the prison crew picking trashing up off the highway spotted the underside of his fancy rented cadillac. But it's a whole other thing when it's _Alice_. Death is not pretty, and actually is really fucking ugly when you've got your little sister in the back of your mind. The human body is a miraculous machine, and it breaks down in a very specific way. It depends on the temperature and the humidity and the exposure to sunlight, wind, and rain, but decomposition starts exactly four minutes after you die. One: Your body acclimates to external temperatures: algor mortis. Two: Your blood settles and discolors your skin: livor mortis. Three: Your cytoplasm turns gummy and stiff: rigor mortis.

Your fat literally turns into soap.

 _Soap_.

The soap thing really got to me. That was the night I made a promise. I made lots of promises, actually. A promise to my dad that I'd find whoever did this so that he could stop killing himself trying to track down a mirage. A promise to my mom that I'd prove to her it wasn't my fault, and it wasn't hers for letting me be in charge that night. A proms

A promise to Alice.

Because no one wants to be soap.

* * *

AN:

Forever grateful for HH.


	6. Chapter 6

Three months after it happened, the blood and the knife and the dead girl and the missing sister, I started investigating my first suspect.

Matthew Blanchard.

I didn't even know why I was following him. He was just some loser from the edge of town who had eight mangy dogs and a rotting double-wide. He was fat and balding and smelled like fish. If he couldn't even bathe regularly, I don't know why I thought he was capable of murder, but I followed him anyway. He didn't work, not that I could tell, just orbited steadily between the sagging couch on his front porch, the stinky bar down on Columbine, and the grocery store where he bought dog food in bulk and cans of tuna fish by the thousands. He would be the last person on earth who was fast enough, smart enough, or sly enough, to break into my house and murder a couple of girls right underneath my nose.

But his boots. Those boots. They matched that print in the yard.

At least I thought they did.

Until I stole one off his porch and realized it wasn't the right size.

After Matthew, it was Stanley Franklin.

He owned the hardware store downtown, and I knew it was too easy, too obvious, but he had access to that same kind of screwdriver they found underneath the porch. The Dewalt with the fat black and yellow handle like gripping a giant bee in your hand with its stinger all rusted and dull. I spent hours loitering in the aisles, pretending to inspect electrical couplings and threepenny nails, while I watched Stanley out of the corner of my eye. He always wore plaid. Plaid in different colors and patterns, but always plaid, and always tucked into his jeans. He never took off his wedding ring and never took off his baseball cap either, but that was because he was balding beneath it. He had a nice smile, but serial killers always had nice smiles until you knew what they were capable of. I snuck into the back of his pickup and snapped the lock on his toolbox with a bolt cutter.

He did have that same brand of screwdriver. In fact, he had that particular screwdriver, not only one but _two_ of them. Both of them shiny, rust-free, obviously well taken care of.

Angela Webber. She worked the graveyard shift at the gas station that sat on the county line, almost four miles out of town. She got divorced a few years ago and had fallen off of every wagon. She was forty pounds heavier. Forty ounces of beer every forty hours. Forty years old with only four years left to live, but I didn't know that part yet. She used hair dye like other people used toothpaste and smoked a pack and half a day of those long skinny cigarettes that smell like vanilla. Her mouth was puckered, her eyes were pinched, and she never smiled, not once in the whole time I watched her. Her daughter died years ago, before I was even alive, because one of those vanilla cigarettes caught the curtains, and the house went up faster than a hay barn in August. She always scowled at us when we came in to buy gum and sour candies, licking her lips like she couldn't decide if she wanted to yell at us, or eat us. Exactly the kind of woman Alice probably annoyed the bejesus out of at the end of a long shift.

I followed Angela until I intercepted a piece of her mail, a printout from Dr. Singer's office, basically convinced that she had stolen Alice to replace her dead daughter.

Her blood type was O positive.

Timothy Samuels.

The librarian. Who better to be a murderer than the smartest guy in town? Too much quiet time, too many books, enough research to cover his tracks and pull off the perfect crime. Big brains and idle hands and all that nonsense. It was obviously the reason he'd gotten away with it. He lived in a cute little house on the main drag painted pastel blue with every color of tulip imaginable in the front yard. A cherry tree and a porch swing and a bird bath. A little white fence and a big crumbly chimney and lace in the windows. It was the kind of place they made movies about. A basement of horrors, except he wasn't even in town that night.

He'd been on vacation in Hawai'i with his mistress while his wife was at a knitting conference somewhere in the Midwest.

Three years later, I was still at it.

Three years later, no one has escaped my scrutiny.

I followed the girl who bagged groceries at the D&R out near PA, the one with the lazy eye and the alcoholic boyfriend. I followed the guy who ran the old antique store at the end of Main Street, the one that was really just a place for everyone to drop off their junk and call it vintage. I followed a nurse from the clinic who stopped at the liquor store on her way home every day and woke up shit-faced every morning. I followed a group of boys who plagued the high school hallways and smoked weed in the abandoned opera house on the weekends. The lady who taught yoga at the community center. The guy who cleaned the courthouse on Wednesdays, the police station on Fridays, and the library on Tuesdays, at nine pm sharp. I followed the entire town, one way or another. Everyone came away with clean noses, clean hands, clean consciences.

At least when it came to dead girls.

I was going to solve this shit if it killed me.

I was beginning to suspect that this shit might actually kill me.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hadley Hemingway is the sun to my meadow.**


	7. Chapter 7

**Dear Self,**

You wake up in Mrs. Sherman's flower bed with your mouth tasting of metal.

You are cold, and shivering, and _slimey_. In the damp light from the window, you can see a speckle of wet across your arms and hands, and when you wipe your face, your palms come back glistening. Inky black, but you know it's not ink. For all you know, you are the blood-battered hostage of a war. The gutted victim of a homicide. The bystander to a triple takedown.

But you don't know anything.

All you know is your mouth tastes horrible, and you need to get home.

There are roses around your ears and violets between your fingers, and you've crushed her peonies beneath your feet. You can hear her from the house, the off-key singing she does because she's still stuck in a youth spent chasing a Broadway dream that died somewhere in the Midwest with a positive pregnancy test and a bad case of deadbeat dad. She was probably wearing that see-through robe and smoking those black cigarettes, indulging her drinking problem with a mixture of gin and whiskey She was probably inspecting every wrinkle in the mirror, pulling her temples back, and her chin up, and her lips tight over her teeth.

She was probably going to come outside in the morning and flip her shit over her ruined flower bed.

You duck through the darkened yard, avoiding the glow from the windows like some dark nocturnal creature. Mrs. Sherman lived on the complete opposite side of town, and it's kind of amazing that you made it this far without getting picked up by the cops. Thank god for that, because you're only wearing a bra and a pair of sweatpants, and you're fucking freezing. You hop fences and run down alleyways to get home, hiding behind some especially smelly trash cans when one of those cop cars rolls slowly by. You scare a cat that screeches beneath someone's porch and fling yourself into the dark when the living room light bursts on. You get caught up in a wild morning-glory bush that's eating up a fence you scrambled over, and you end up trailing flowers all the way back to your house.

You should have known something was wrong.

You should have known.

Even from the end of the driveway, the house felt hollow. Like the space in a bowl waiting to be filled, like the see-through squares of a window, suddenly empty, and nothing more. You should have known the moment you stepped through the door, but you don't. You don't notice anything out of place until you make it to the kitchen, and you slip. Your feet go out from underneath you, and you land knees and palms in a puddle of something wet and warm and thick. You stand, unsteady, feet still slipping, and reach for the lightswitch.

The kitchen floods with a weak yellow glow from the ancient overhead light, and you can't move. You can't blink. Can't breathe. Can't feel your heart, or your skin, or your eyes. Can't cry, or swallow, or sob. You can't even scream. You drop your eyes to your feet, and you don't look up. Reaching blindly for the old rotary phone on the wall with the long curly cord, you press the phone to your ear as the panic starts to rise. You wait with something concrete blooming in your throat and weight like a hurricane sitting on your breastbone, and when the line clicks on and his gruff voice comes through the speaker, you lose your shit entirely.

You can only whisper even though you feel like screaming.

"Dad?"

 **Sincerely,**

 **Me**

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Falls down at the altar of Hadley Hemingway.**


	8. Chapter 8

I'm home alone when the doorbell rings.

The panic is immediate. There are too many exits. Too many entrances. Too many people who might be too curious, too drunk, or too angry, and they could come knocking with the taste of too much vengeance on their tongues. The backwoods raving lunatics determined to right a wrong, home-brewed moonshine in their bellies and the rage of a thousand scared townsfolk singing through their veins. The suburban helmet heads in their minivans and their herringbone, their baby monitors in their back pockets, and the numbers to their security systems programmed into their cell phones.

The teachers who should have seen me coming.

The classmates who knew it all along.

It could be anyone.

I tiptoe through the house and slink up to the peephole, but it's not a backwoods anarchist, or a suburban housewife, or even a concerned citizen. It's not Mr. Welburn with his fuzzy grey hair and that wrinkle between his eyes, on the hunt for blood. It's not Stephanie Walsh with her nose in the air and her cheerleading skirt rolled up two extra inches, searching for rumors. It's not old Mrs. Franklin with her ugly toy poodle and her gout, looking for gossip.

It's a guy in a suit who looks likes he's prepared to sell me a vacuum. Or god.

"I'm not home!" I yell through the door and watch him startle through my fisheye view. He looks hard right at the peep hole, and I swear he can see me through it.

"Yes. Yes, you are," he says simply.

He looks sick. Like terminal sick. Like his blood cells stopped working, and he's been surviving on air and not much else. Like he caught some weird disease that snatches away the color in his eyes and leaves him hunched over, pale as snow. His hands are shaky, and his cheeks are hollow, and his eyes are empty and dark. He's dressed in a suit that looks limp and heavy, hanging off his shoulders. Tie loose. Buttons undone. Shirt wrinkled.

Young and half-dead and beautiful.

"Let me in, Bella Swan."

When he says it, my name, my heart grinds to a stuttering halt. My blood freezes. My skin goes creepy-crawly cold. I don't even have time to wonder how he knows it before I'm flinging the door open, trying to look bigger than I am. I straighten my spine and throw my chin up and stick my chest out like I don't actually weigh just a hundred odd pounds. Like I'm a thousand pounds of gravity. A million pounds of concrete. A zillion tons of earth. The unbearable weight of the universe, not some girl with bird bones or paper skin or a heart like a helium balloon.

His nostrils flare.

"What do you want?"

"Let me in," he says, his voice as rough and worn and as tired as his face.

"I don't even know your name. I'm not stupid," I hiss.

"Edward."

I wait for it, but he doesn't offer up anything more.

"That's it? Just, Edward?"

He nods, only once, and he still hasn't blinked.

"Well, _just_ Edward, I don't need a vacuum. Thanks, anyway." I step back and start to shut the door, but then his hand is splayed across the wood next to my face, and the door is stationary, and all I can think is that his skin smells like the very middle of the forest where the oldest trees grow.

"I'm not selling anything."

"I don't need Jesus either," I say.

"Come with me."

Before I can turn to run, flee, scramble away, he has a hand around my wrist and has dragged me clear out of the house. I'm off the porch, into the grass, my bare feet fumbling along behind him in an effort to keep up. He is fast, despite looking so sick, but his hand is freezing cold, and he's breathing hard with a wheezing sound in his throat that cannot be healthy. He marches up to the edge of the forest where the elderberry and the sumac stand shoulder to shoulder, like the front line of an army defending something that you think is big and grand but is really only small and meek, and maybe not even worth defending. It's not raining, but the fog is so thick you could slice through it. Even from a few feet away, standing staring off into the trees, he looks like a shadow.

"I'm not going in there with you." I halt, wrenching myself out of his grip, my hands shaking. I'm sure, really sure, that he's going to take me into that dark forest and pull some self-righteous revenge-killing on me. He doesn't look like a housewife, or a backwoods hillbilly. In that suit, he looks like a goddamn assassin.

"Is that so?" He'd probably deny it, but I swear to god he's laughing at me.

"No fucking way. You're gonna take me in there and beat me to death and then bury me under a tree. They'll never even find me."

"I have no intention of doing that." He licks his lips, the inside of his mouth red against his sickly skin, eyes all over my face. He takes a step closer, a hand floating shaky out toward me. "You're giving up too easily," he says.

"What?" I stammer. He's too close, too stern, and too strong. It's making my head spin funny. All I see is the flash of his hand near my face, and then he's pulling me through the forest faster than my feet can keep up with. A blind stumble through the trees with my hand held tight in his, and there is no warmth coming up through his bones. There is no give to his skin, no take from his muscles. No flush or thump or breath. He skids to a halt, dropping me into the leaves beneath a gnarled tree before I even have time to wonder what all that means.

Edward looks up at the sky for a moment, breathing steady and slow, until he's no longer wheezing. Even still, his chest doesn't move, and his eyes don't blink, and he's not even flushed from running through the woods like that. I turn red just walking up my stairs.

"Dig." He turns to point at the ground between my knees, tone oddly bland like he didn't just run me out into the middle of the woods to kill me.

"Are you serious?" My mouth drops open.

"Deadly." He isn't even looking at me, and I'm not even remotely gonna do that.

"No."

Edward scowls at me. "It's about Alice."

I gulp and shove my hands into the loam. My fingers push through the wet and damp and cold, and I try to ignore the rotten egg smell that drifts up from between my knees with each handful I push aside. Try to ignore the skittering feet of insects and the wet slime of worms. Blindly digging and digging and digging until he tells me to stop by pushing me aside. I scramble to my feet, my legs covered in dirt and my hands caked in mud, to watch him finish the job. Edward pulls something from the hole and brushes off the mud, the dull glint of metal in the moonlight.

"What is it?" I ask, peering around his shoulder. He holds it up, a sharp blade with a wooden handle that looks oddly familiar. I feel the sink in my stomach before he even tells me what it is.

"This is the knife you stabbed me with. I buried it here."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **As ever, Hadley waves her wand over this and then I usually fuck it all up again tweaking things at the last minute.**

 **Any and all mistakes are mine.**

 **Thank you for reading.**


	9. Chapter 9

Edward lets me keep the knife.

It's stupid, bringing it home, but there's a riptide of morbid curiosity barreling through me. Now that I know that I stabbed someone with it, I can't let it go. I really want to ask him if I could see the scar, but I'm way too embarrassed to actually do such a thing. Instead, I just trudge along behind him back through the forest. We sit on the porch in the dark, and I spin that knife in my hands while he glares off across the yard.

"Sorry for stabbing you," I say.

Edward just shrugs like it was no big deal, like people stabbed strangers every day. Like it was normal or something.

"You couldn't hurt me even if you tried," he wheezes.

"Why did I do it?"

"I scared you. It was an accident."

I peek at him out the corner of my eye, trying to imagine what it was like, sinking the blade into him. I wonder if I hit a bone or an intestine. Maybe I'd managed sheer stupid luck and slid it into the slim centimeter of space where nothing important was in the way, just like that girl on the highway a few years back. A big iron pole from a construction vehicle burst through her windshield and pinned her to the seat when it went through her chest. It missed her heart by millimeters. Missed her lung by even less. She was a miracle.

Maybe he was too.

"Where did you come from?"

"A different century," he sighs and drops his chin to his chest. I can't tell if he's making a joke or just being sarcastic. He must hear me huff because he shakes his head and says, "Alaska."

"So, you're on vacation?"

"No, I live here."

"I've never seen you." I rack my brain for him but come up empty, which is weird. Small towns like this make strangers impossible to miss. How this guy with his sick face and his wheeze and that assassin suit could go unnoticed, I don't understand.

"I own a house here," he says.

"Where?"

"Out of town. Down the 101, on Hollow Road. "

There's only one house out that way, and it's haunted. At least that's the rumor. I haven't seen the actual house, but I know the driveway is barely a driveway, overgrown and shadowed and not much more than a hole in the dense forest that borders the highway. Half the town would tell you that an entire family was murdered there. The other half claims that the family murdered each other.

"I thought that house was haunted," I mumble.

Edward laughs. A hard, rough laugh that catches in his throat.

"You have no idea."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **I am a mess, but Hadley Hemingway fixes me up. I cannot thank her enough.**

 **Thank you for reading.**

 **bzzzzzzzz**


	10. Chapter 10

"I'm going to Seattle tomorrow." Dad keeps looking at his spaghetti when he says this, like he's embarrassed to admit it or something. I knew it was coming. He's been staying late after work, and that always means he thinks he's found a lead. That guy he told me about… That guy must be more than just a lead for him to pick up and go investigate him.

"That guy?" I ask, spinning my own spaghetti.

"Yeah. I think I'm on to something." He shoves a giant forkful in his mouth, almost as if it will keep him from having to say any more. He gets sauce in his mustache.

"Who is he?" I stab my spaghetti a little harder.

"Works the shipyards." Dad shrugs and gulps and spins more spaghetti around his fork. Spins and spins and spins.

"That's it?" I stare at him, waiting for him to quit it with the endless spinning and just tell me something substantial already. I wish I could tell him about all my investigations, the locals that I trailed. Part of me wants to think that maybe he would take me seriously and start including me in his searches, but I know that he'll just tell me to leave that job to the professionals and pay attention in school instead.

Dad shrugs. "He was seen in Port Angeles the day before the… " His eyes dart toward the living room, and he clears his throat. "Anyway, will you be ok for a night?"

He wants me to stay here.

 _Alone_.

"Sure," I mutter and stab, stab, stab with a shaky hand and tears in my eyes.

* * *

I'm at the park that afternoon keeping an eye on Stephanie Felice when I see Edward again.

Stephanie is a senior at my school. She plays varsity volleyball and varsity basketball and runs first string track and sits second flute in band. She volunteers to tutor middle school kids in math every Saturday and works one day a week at the nursing home pushing old ladies around the gardens in their wheelchairs, pretending to be their granddaughter. She walks her little brother home from school every day and picks up trash along the highway with her youth group every summer. She has curly blonde hair and big blue eyes and long, long legs and could probably be Barbie's little sister.

Basically, she's perfect.

I hate her.

I'm pretty sure that she murdered my sister. I have absolutely no evidence, no reason to even suspect her really, but I'm almost convinced. People that good, people that perfect? Their demons are bigger and darker and hidden even deeper. I've been trailing her around for weeks now, and I know, _I just know_ , that at any moment she's gonna crack, and I'll finally get some proof.

What that proof will be, I have no idea.

It's when I'm darting behind another tree to get a little closer that I see Edward. I gasp and stumble and go down to my hands and knees in the grass, scraping my skin and bruising my pride, and Stephanie looks over at me with her pretty, perfect face full of concern, that bitch.

"Are you ok?" she asks, and I grumble and huff and mutter to myself as I stand and brush the dirt off my legs. Both of my knees are bleeding. Don't even ask about my pride.

"Yeah. I'm fine," I hiss, then glare over at Edward. He's standing beneath a tree on the far side of the park with his hands in the pockets of that same limp suit, and he looks no better than the last time I saw him. Still pale. Still shadowed. Still slumped. He's shaking his head at me like he disapproves, and I stomp over to him, ignoring the screaming kids running between us.

"Leave me alone."

"I'm not bothering you," he says, still shaking his head, but his mouth is almost smiling.

"Yes. Yes, you are. You're following me."

"Like you're following that girl?" He looks over at Stephanie just as she brushes the sand off her brother and kisses his cheek and then they're off, holding hands like they always do, headed home like a goddamn Lifetime movie, and did I mention how much I hate that girl?

"She murdered Alice," I tell him, completely convinced of it.

"No. She didn't."

I narrow my eyes at him. "You know that _how_?"

"I just do." He shrugs and doesn't meet my glare, and I resist the urge to kick him in the shin.

"You are the most frustrating person I know."

"Probably not," he says, staring down at me. "You're alone tonight?"

I narrow my eyes at him. "How did you know that?"

He ignores my question. "Will you be ok?"

"I'm not a child."

One, just one, of his eyebrows rises high into his forehead. He says nothing.

"Ok, _fine_ , I'm legally still a child, but I can sleep alone."

"That's not what I asked. I asked if you would be ok."

"I'll be fine," I mutter, even though just the thought of a night alone in that house has my heart fluttering like a hummingbird on speed and my blood pumping fast enough to make my vision go fuzzy. My palms are clammy. My knees are weak. I can't even feel the earth beneath me, and I have to swallow a few times to wet my mouth because I've dried up like a desert.

"I'll come by to check on you," he says.

"Don't bother."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hop over to Facebook and tell Hadley Hemingway she's the shit.**

 **That girl deserves parades and diamonds, none of which I can afford.**


	11. Chapter 11

"I thought I told you not to bother."

I open the door to Edward, glaring at him, wishing I could just smile and look pretty and invite him inside. But I'm not pretty, and I can't smile. He comes inside anyway.

Every time I see him, I think he gets a little hotter. I don't know how that's possible because every time I see him, he also looks a little sicker. The circles under his eyes are darker, and his skin is paler, and his hands are shakier, which is probably why they're always in his pockets. He needs more fresh air. He needs a new liver or lung or heart. He needs a blood transfusion and a protein shake.

He needs a haircut.

"Your old man have any liquor?" He's looking around, inspecting, and the house is a wreck, and I'm a wreck, and I wish I had changed into something nicer than these sweats and this tank top. I wish I had brushed my hair this morning. Wish I had picked up, spruced up, or at least bothered to wear underwear.

"Yeah, in here." I turn and hightail it to the living room, falling to my knees in front of the entertainment center and pulling out stacks of dvds to reach the bottle of whiskey I hid back there before the great alcohol purge of last month. It happens a couple of times a year or so: Dad deciding that he's done drinking. He pours everything down the drain, and it lasts about thirty days before he's bringing home six packs and bottles again. We don't acknowledge it. Just wash, rinse, and repeat the same ritual three or four times a year like we didn't just do it a few months before.

I hand Edward the bottle, and he falls onto the saggy old couch that used to be the color of a sunset but now looked like a rotten old peach. I stay where I am, watching him take a big long drink. Too big. Too long. Like he doesn't even need to breathe and doesn't give a shit about his liver either.

"Drinking is bad for you."

"A lot of things are bad for you." He stares at me like he's about to tell me _what_ exactly is so bad for me, twitching his fingers to loosen his tie and clearing his throat like maybe it's him that's bad. Maybe he's bad enough already and the liquor won't do much worse, but it sure won't help anything either. His lips are pale today, paler than yesterday, and his eyes are darker, if that's even possible. His hair looks the same. His suit looks the same, sullen and slack. I'm not entirely sure how someone can change so much but not change at all.

"Are you sick?" I ask.

"Why?" His eyes narrow, but he drops them from me to inspect the bottle in his hand instead, swallowing hard around nothing but air.

"You _look_ sick." I shrug. "You look tired and… sick," I finish lamely, because I realize halfway through how rude I sound. When someone tells you that you look tired, they are really only trying to tell you that you look like shit, but they don't know how to say it any nicer than that.

"I'm not sick," he says, but I don't believe him. I can't.

He's not healthy, that's for certain.

Edward is looking around again instead of at me, eyes on the guns piled in the corner, the beheaded deer mounted to the wall, the discarded camo and neon orange clothing in a pile near the back door. For a cop, my father has just about the worst gun etiquette of anyone I know. No locked case. No safeties. No lessons in " _people don't kill people, guns kill people_ " that most kids get. He just expected me to adapt and by adapt, he expected me not to pay them any mind or touch them.

So I didn't.

"Where'd he go? Your dad?" he asks.

"You're avoiding me," I accuse.

"Yes." Edward nods. He doesn't even try to deny it.

What a load of nerve this guy has.

"Seattle," I say, feeling glum and lonely and weirdly uncomfortable.

"Got family there?"

"No. He's… investigating," I resist the urge to roll my eyes. This is easily dad's fifth trip this year to some random location, chasing a lead that would most likely turn into a dead end.

"Investigating what?"

I narrow my eyes. It's instinct. Grind my teeth. Also instinct. Dig my fingernails into my palms and ball my fists against my thighs because instinct was all I had in moments like this. It didn't happen often, but when it did, I felt like an animal that didn't know how to deal with the realities of life without teeth or claws or blind biting rage. Moments like this, I bared my canines and retreated back into my hole because explaining this to a new person never got any easier.

I'd honestly rather go chew through my foot.

"You know," I huff. "Don't fucking make me say it."

He just stares at me. A part of me, a small part, starts to hate him.

"Know what?"

I flop back onto the carpet, an old shag that isn't soft anymore, and stare up at the ceiling with my heart in my ears and my stomach in my throat. I hate retelling it. Hate reliving it. Hate that I have to go there again for this guy who should just march his sick, sorry ass down to the library and skim through the backdated newspapers. He should go to the cop shop and ask one of those bastards to fill him in, because it's easy to recount a tragedy when it belongs to someone else. All the gruesome details become bothersome and boring when it's not your situation, not your life, not your nightmare.

"She's dead," I say, and I hear him clear his throat, but I don't look anywhere except the ceiling and press on. "I mean, maybe not dead, but she's been gone for three years, and I'm pretty sure she's dead. My dad is still looking."

"For her?" Edward actually perks up for this. He leans forward, sets the bottle down, puts his elbows to his knees and threads his fingers together. While he's doing this, he hasn't taken his eyes off of me. It's hot and cold and feels good but also hurts somehow.

"Of course not. He gave up on her a long time ago."

"People come back, you know? Children come home."

I shake my head slowly against the carpet, wishing with every molecule in my body that such a thing could be her truth, my truth, our truth. The fact that it can't be, _won't_ be, sucks more than just about anything else in the world. Her last school photo, third grade, pigtails, that ridiculous calico dress she'd started a love affair with a few weeks before and refused to take off, the one with the enormous lace collar and the puffed sleeves and the tiny pearl buttons at her wrist, it all stares down at me from the mantle. I fucking hated that dress.

"Not Alice." I shake my head. "She won't come home."

"You sound so sure."

"I am."

Yeah, kids come home, but then they lead police to their abductor. If you asked me, if I took a kid, the last thing I'd do is let that kid escape alive."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hadley Hemingway fixes this up, leaves me little flailing "OMG THIS THIS THIS" comments, and wonders where I am at two in the morning.**

 **God bless that girl.**


	12. Chapter 12

**Dear Self,**

Your mother's favorite story to tell about your birth was the one where she asked the nurses to give you away, or lose you on purpose. To switch you at the very least.

She wanted a prettier baby, a quieter baby. One not so skinny. Or loud.

Or real.

You were an oops. That kind of oops you don't even realize happened until it's too late, and suddenly there's a human inside of you. The kind of slip that's really just a split second, and suddenly you're growing hair and teeth and brain cells and in ten months or so, you'll be responsible for keeping it alive. Alice was another oops, but by the time she came along, the deal had already been broken. There was more fighting than friendly family dinners. Your mother had started sleeping down the hallway in the impending nursery long before the new baby arrived. Your dad spent more time hunting than home, more time fishing than being a father. You spent most of your time under the back porch with the dirt and the worms building castles out of the soft dark dirt.

That was your first really bad idea because you got some sort of weird rash on your knees that spread down your legs, and by the time you worked up the courage to tell anyone about it, you looked like you'd stood in a bonfire for a few seconds too long. It took almost six months of antibiotics and some green smelly salve to clear it all up.

A few months later, you tried to become a mermaid and ended up flooding the upstairs bathroom, which in turn flooded the downstairs living room and short circuited the fancy flat screen television your dad had just bought himself to watch baseball on. The house got new carpet, new drywall, new curtains, your dad got another new tv. You got grounded for almost a month.

The next year, you played dress-up with the cat and accidentally strangled it when it tore out of the house wearing a tiny pink doll dress printed with yellow flowers and trimmed with a lacy collar that got caught up in a barbed wire fence. You set your tree house on fire a week later trying to hold a funeral for the cat, toppling one of the candles you stole from the pantry, the ones that were supposed to be saved for the nights when the northwest storms blew through and knocked out the power. It took three days for anyone to actually notice the charred remains in the old sycamore out back, but when they did, your parents grounded you. Again. This time for two months.

In seventh grade, you decided to drive to Port Angeles at midnight because you'd eaten the last of your dad's special ice cream, and he'd be so mad when he got home from the double he was pulling down at the station that fear got you behind the wheel of the old station wagon. You sat on a pillow to see over the dash and drove halfway there with the parking brake on before you figured out how to disengage it. You spent every last dime of your allowance and even needed to scrounge the car for a few quarters to make up the difference. You got pulled over for speeding on the way back. By him. Grounded. Three months.

You wore black lipstick to school and never lived it down. You tried out for the cheerleading team and never lived it down. You won an art contest with a drawing of a sad girl in a puddle of blood and never lived it down. Most of your high school career was one big long first-hand account of the acute kind of humiliation that only teenagers can inflict on other teenagers. Gitmo doesn't have shit on high school. Waterboarding, isolation, all that shit was small potatoes compared to the bathroom interrogations, and the locker room beatings, and the hallway gauntlets. Problem was, most of it was your own fault. You could have flown under the radar, could have just slunk through the building and not made eye contact and sat in the back with your head in your books and then gotten the fuck out of there with a little bit of your integrity intact but, for some reason, you couldn't seem to do that. It's like you invited it, the lipstick and the tryouts and the bloody artwork.

Not to mention the sleepwalking.

Your entire life has been one big bad idea.

But your worst idea yet?

Falling for this guy.

First of all, you don't know anything about him. He might not have a job. He definitely doesn't have a car. He can run too fast and drink too much, and you've never seen him eat anything. What if he hates peanut butter? That's a deal breaker in your book. What if he loves his mother? You're not sure you know how to even do that anymore, and what if that's a deal breaker for him? What if he's addicted to drugs? What if he _deals_ the drugs? What if he reads books by Nietzsche and Proust? What if he hates the fact that you spend your nights reading smutty fanfiction and scrolling through Tumblr, instead of educating your brain? What if his favorite time of day is the middle of the night, and he finds out that's usually when you're fast asleep, walking somewhere?

What if everything about him clashes with everything about you? That could be a problem.

But the biggest problem?

You don't know _how_ to like someone.

You have no experience with this. Even having a crush on someone is kind of like rowing yourself out into the middle of the ocean and closing your eyes to spin your little boat all around, then using just your nose to row yourself home. You're gonna end up in China. Or Australia. Or the friggin' Antarctic before you make it back to the place you started.

Plus, who wants to spend weeks at sea in a tiny rowboat with nothing but sun and sharks and seaweed?

 **Yours Truly,**

 **You**

* * *

Later, when Edward was standing in my doorway about to leave me alone in my big empty house to spend an entire night by myself, I'm not wondering where I'm going to wake up later. I'm not wondering what I'll have to do to keep myself awake all night. I'm not wondering why my heart feels so faint or my head feels so heavy or my stomach feels like it's full of the entire ocean and all of its millions of riptides.

I'm wondering what it would feel like to let myself like him.

"What are you staring at?" I ask him.

"Your face." He licks his lips and blinks twice and still doesn't take his eyes off of me.

"I hate my face," I grumble.

"Funny, that's the part about you I like the best."

When he says it, so easy like it's natural, like he wasn't even thinking about trying to keep it a secret, my heart jams itself so hard up into my throat that I have to fight back the urge to choke when he reaches a hand out in my direction. I rip my eyes off his face, and it's just his fingertips reaching for me, the ridges in his skin and the nails he has trimmed down neat and short and square, the cuff of his shirt peeking from beneath the arm of his suit and then his hand is on my cheek, and I finally look up at him.

He's pretty fucking beautiful, really.

Beautiful like the multicolored rainbow of a ten million gallon oil spill.

Beautiful like the triple trillion heat of a space swallowing nebula.

"May I?"

For a moment, I can't believe he actually asked. Do people even do that anymore? Ask like that? I'm almost certain that I know what he's going to do. Kiss me. Kiss my mouth, press his lips to mine, and I'm wondering cliche romance novel things like whether he'll taste like oranges or smell like cedar. Whether he'll steal a simple peck or if he'll lick the seam of my lips to get me to open to him in a real, full-blown tongue tangle. Whether he'll put his hand on my waist or his fingers through my belt loops or if he'll slip up underneath my shirt and it's then that I remember that I forgot to wear a nice bra today, so I'm really hoping he doesn't do that.

But then he just comes in at my forehead.

A kiss. To my _forehead_.

"I have to go," he says, just far enough away that I can feel the sweep of his cold lips against my skin.

"Where?"

"Home. I have a… uh… a guest."

"Someone is visiting your haunted house?" I step back. Furrow my brows. It's not his hesitant voice or the fact that he's not looking at me, because he never really does. It's not the shuffle in his feet or the downcast of his chin. It's the fact that he is actually living at the old haunted house out on Hollow Road, and now he has a visitor.

"Sort of." He swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing right there in front of my eyes, and just before I find the thump of his pulse beneath his skin, he's gone. Off the porch and out of sight and my thousands of tiny bad ideas are slowly blooming into one big giant weed of a crush on this guy who just kissed my _forehead_.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Thank you for joining me here.**

 **And thanks to Hadley Hemingway for basically being the best thing in the history of ever.**


	13. Chapter 13

Dad storms in the door at 10:14 a.m.

He looks tired, like he hasn't slept at all, and he must have driven overnight to get home this early. He flies right by me and starts digging through a laundry basket on the end of the couch, pulling free a clean uniform and stripping out of his old clothes right there in the living room. He's breathing hard as he hops into his slacks, panting as he tugs on his socks.

"How was Seattle?" I ask, and he stops, a limp sock in one hand, and his mouth hanging open for a moment before he closes it, staring at me like I'm suddenly speaking a different language.

"Seattle?" he asks, blinking at me like an owl caught up in a barbed wire fence.

"Yeah, Seattle. The guy?"

"Oh, _that_. It was nothing." He shakes his head, muttering to himself and shoving his arms into the sleeves of his cop top, strapping on his holster and loading his gun. I watch every move, most of it memorized, shaking my head in disbelief.

"That's it?"

"Yep," he huffs, fumbling with the second sock, totally ignoring me..

"You're just giving up?"

"I'm not giving up!" He yells loud enough to startle me, loud enough that I jump in my skin. He's breathing hard, and his hands are shaking, and his face has gone pale. When he finally looks at me, his eyes are heavy and dull. "I'm not giving up, Bells. I'll never give up. But I've got a murder on my hands right now that I've got to go deal with. I can't handle this friggin' inquisition from you."

I watch him tuck his gun and sit on the couch to lace up the ugly black shoes they make him wear, my own mouth hanging open.

"A murder?" I whisper. It's about all I can manage, my heart jammed so high up in my throat I can barely breathe around it.

He just nods, double knotting his laces.

"Another one?" I ask. I must sound bad because that gets him to look up at me. The corners of his eyes pinch, and he shakes his head. I nod. He shakes harder.

"It's not him, Bella."

"But it could be." I'm still whispering, and I'm not sure if it's just my voice trembling or my whole body. He's still shaking his head as he stands, wiping his palms on his thighs.

"It's not. There's a body. There's blood. There's no forced entry. It's not him, Bells." He takes a step toward me slowly, like he doesn't want to startle me, and puts a hand on my shoulder. "I'll be back before dinner."

"Can I go with you?" I ask. It's not that I'm scared to be alone. Not that I think maybe I'm a loose end that needs to be tied up or chopped off or trimmed back by the person who got my sister but left me sleeping in the next room. It's not that I think that I might be next.

It's that there's been another one, another murder, and I need to see it for myself.

"Bells…" He's trying to say no, shaking his head, his eyes narrowed, so I make myself look extra sweet and even push up a few watery tears to make him think it _is_ about the fear, the "don't leave me alone, Dad" plea any other seventeen-year-old would give her old man.

He totally buys it.

"Ok. Let's go."

* * *

Billy Black is lying face down in a pool of his own blood on the floor of his bedroom.

The tiny, slumped trailer smells like what hell probably smells. It's dank and dusty, and the curtains are molded. The refrigerator is leaking the faint traces of doom and decay, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is Billy. He's been lying there for five days, and he's starting to go putrid. Starting to turn a little black around the edges. I guess for most people this would seem gruesome, but I've already done a slip and slide through my own kitchen, the familiar tile doused in blood, so this sort of small time on the shock factor scale. I've spent so many nights researching decomposition that the FBI is probably watching my computer; I know exactly what is going down here, and none of it bothers me as much as it probably should.

"You shouldn't be here."

"Shut the fuck up, Newton," I hiss. I don't look around, but all the hair on my arms stands on end, and I clench my fists to keep myself from gagging. I can't see him, but I know he's there.

"Not just my opinion, sweets. Whole staff thinks it's kinda odd how he lets you tag along."

Mike appears, leaning against the doorframe beside me, hands in the pockets of his police-issue pants, watching the coroner poke around in the blood puddle Billy is sprawled out in. Mike Newton is a hometown boy who had big dreams and big plans and big ambitions, but too little gumption to make anything of himself. He was a little too dumb for law school. A little too slow for a football scholarship. A little too rowdy for the State Patrol. His last three girlfriends lasted less than two months apiece, and he has a close, personal relationship with Smitty, the scary tattooed guy who runs the liquor store on the Rez.

 _Really_ personal.

He doesn't know I know that part yet.

"Oh, yeah?" I laugh. "The same staff that helped you bury your arrest record? How's Amanda, by the way? " I can barely remember it, but the underage girl and the gram of coke he was caught with are the reasons he's still a local lackey. Mike goes red and stammers something I can't understand. I narrow my eyes at him because I know it makes me look more like my dad and then lean in really close because it's totally intimidating if you do it fast and hard enough. He smells like wintergreen and cigarettes and not enough deodorant.

I watch Newton retreat with his tail tucked up so far between his legs that it's practically nonexistent as I hear the coroner say "blood loss" and "surface wounds" and "animal attack."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hadley is my one true love.**

 **All of my gratitude to her for making this less of a mess and more of a readable mystery.**

 **(Also, thanks for making ME more readable and less messy.)**


	14. Chapter 14

**Ten things about your dad:**

 **One**.

He is essentially the "good cop." Not all of them go into the job with a pure, unadulterated drive for civic duty, but he did. Your grandfather was killed by a drunk somewhere out on the Wyoming flatlands, and your grandmother was robbed at gunpoint on a street corner in Phoenix. The gun didn't kill her, but the fear-induced heart attack did. The police never found the guy who stopped her life, so Dad's always been a bit of a vigilante.

 **Two**.

He probably loved your mom at some point or another.

Probably.

Maybe.

 **Three**.

He definitely doesn't anymore.

 **Four**.

He still refuses to teach you how to shoot a gun. You ask him every year on your birthday, but he seems to think you're better off not knowing. You're not sure if that's because he doesn't want you to accidentally shoot your own foot off, or that he worries you may take things into your own hands and actually off someone for real someday.

Either way, he doesn't trust you with a firearm.

 **Five**.

Spaghetti is a literal food group.

 **Six**

He used to go fishing every weekend. He had a special spot, special vest, special pole, special hour, and to anyone else he probably seemed superstitious. Maybe he is. But it worked for him. He called it "therapy," the killing of fish.

 **Seven**

The only time you've ever seen him cry was about a week after the whole Alice thing. You had a nightmare and went looking for your dad because he was big and strong and brave enough to fight off whatever demons had followed you into your dreams, but when you found him, he was crying. On the couch, in the dark, unopened beer between his feet, his face between his hands. You stood in the doorway listening and watching and not moving because you'd never seen him like that before and it scared you even worse than that nightmare.

 **Ten**

Alice completely ruined him.

* * *

"Got you something."

Dad puts a paper gift bag on the book in front of me, the handles tied together with a purple ribbon. I look up at him, immediately full of suspicion.

"You got me a gift?" I look at him like this is really a test.

He shrugs and is probably blushing, but that fucking beard of his is so big these days, I can't really tell. "Yeah. So what?"

"You got me a _gift_ ," I say, shaking my head. "What's the catch?"

"No catch. Just wanted to." He's all shrugging shoulders, rolling eyes, and shuffling hands as he turns away to make a pot of coffee. I pull the bag toward me and undo the ribbon. Inside, there's a shirt. A pretty shirt. Shiny and sequined and made of really soft fabric, the double-washed kind. But it's _purple_.

"It's purple," I say.

"Yeah. Thought it'd look nice on you."

"Purple."

What is going on?

"Yeah. Purple. It's a _color_." He rolls his eyes at me like I'm not getting his joke.

"What are you even saying right now?" I shake my head at him, and he grunts, leaning back against the counter and staring at me hard for a full minute before he speaks.

"I'm worried about you. You're always…" He waves his hand at me, his eyebrows raised like his point is obvious or something.

"I'm always what?"

"In black." He waves at me harder, and I look down at myself. He's right. Black pants. Black sweatshirt. Black sandals. My t-shirt is black, and my beanie is black, and even my nail polish is black. He doesn't know this part, but my underwear is black too.

"I like black." I shrug, glaring at the purple shirt.

"I can tell. But it's not a happy color, Bella. Maybe if you tried to wear something… else, you wouldn't be so sad anymore."

Like happiness is determined by the color of your clothing.

"I'm not sad." My voice goes hard, and my muscles all stiffen up like I'm suddenly made of stone. This is the very last conversation I want to be having with him, except for the sex talk. Maybe. That one might be less awkward than this.

"Bella," he sighs and rubs his eyes with his thumb and his finger.

"I'm not sad!" I yell it this time, sitting in my chair and feeling small because my feet don't even reach the floor, and my dad is trying to make me wear colors, and everything in the world is terrible right now.

"Yes. You are. You know how I know that?" He asks like he wants an answer, so I just keep my eyes on the stupid purple shirt and shake my head. I hear him sigh. "I know because _I'm_ sad. It takes one to know one, kiddo."

I finally look at him, and oh god, his eyes are watery. Big and wide and wet like baby animals in Disney movies, and he's chewing on his bottom lip, and I hate this. I hate that we're in the kitchen on a perfectly nice day having this conversation because some fucking worthless asshole came in here and took my sister and left us with this big empty space with nothing to fill it up. I hate that my dad is so worried about me that he bought me _clothing,_ and I can't even think about him in a store picking this out because it's almost too embarrassing to comprehend it. I hate that part of me wants to burn the stupid purple shirt, but another part of me, a small secretive part, wants to wear it.

"I just thought we could both start small," he says. "I'm gonna start fishing again. Thought you could wear something that isn't black. We could do it together."

"If I get rid of all my black, I won't have any clothes left," I grumble. I'm actually kind of glad to hear that he's going to take up fishing again. He really liked it, always had a tan and smelled like the woods, and the freezer always had something in it. He smiles that lopsided smile, the only one I've seen for years now, and ruffles my hair as he leaves the kitchen.

"I'm not asking for a rainbow. I'm just asking for a little bit of sunshine, ok?"

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hadley is my little-bit-of-sunshine and gives me soft places to land when I need them.**

 **Thank you for fixing this up, baby.**

 **And thank you for reading, all of you.**

 **xo**

 **HBM**


	15. Chapter 15

I sit on the highway for half an hour before I finally work up the courage to turn down the driveway.

Dad let me borrow the pickup. It's the first time. _Ever_. I've never driven alone, never wanted to or needed to before because no friends means nowhere to be. Until now. Until Edward. When I asked Dad for the keys this morning, he looked shocked enough to pass out in his reheated spaghetti.

"Where are you going?" he asked, sounding like there's nowhere a girl like me would want to be other than right there in that kitchen with the spaghetti and the memories and the stifling father-daughter awkwardness. I shrugged. I didn't know what I was supposed to say. Certainly not: " _There's this creepy, cold, totally hot guy who has been hanging around for some reason, and he finally told me where he lives, so I want to go stalk him._ "

I'm pretty sure that would go over like a lead balloon.

"Not out to the Rez, right?" Dad's big bushy eyebrows smashed together like two caterpillars getting frisky, and I had to try so hard not to laugh out loud because that was totally mean, and he'd probably think I wasn't taking this Rez thing seriously enough. Billy Black's death was still unsolved, and even though the coroner thought it was an animal attack, some people are more animal than human, so who knows, really?

"No. Just. . . _around_ , I guess." I shrugged again. This was awkward. Really awkward. He kept frowning at me for what felt like forever before he shook his head and seemed to give in.

"Ok, but be easy on her." He dropped the keys into my palm, still warm from his pocket. "She's a hell of a lot older than you and twice as stubborn. Double pump the clutch, and remember that the left blinker doesn't work. Use your arm signals. I don't want to have to pull you over later."

I fled before I had to ask him how to double pump anything.

The driveway is just how I imagined it: so overgrown that it's barely a dent in the foliage. There aren't any tire marks in the dirt ruts that cut through the grass, at least not that I can tell, and I wonder just how Edward gets to and from town without a car. He runs like a bullet, but that doesn't mean he runs back and forth every day, right? I mean, he's way too sick and wheezy for that. I still can't shake the fact he reminds me of a doctor who injected himself with some disease just to try out a new cure, still unsure if it's going to work even as he's sticking a needle into his arm.

I bump through the woods, fighting to keep the old truck's wheels in the sunken tracks, wondering just what the fuck I'm doing. Part of me thinks I'm going to show up there and march right in the front door without even knocking, drag him to his couch to kiss him crazy for a while, go silly and stupid on not enough air and too much boy. Another part of me is pretty sure I'm going to turn around before I even get there; I'm not brave enough, brash enough, or even dumb enough to be doing this right now. There's an even another part of me that hopes he'll yell at me, chase me away, tell me to go home.

Then maybe I'll never see him again because I've never been more confused about anything in my life before he showed up and threw the whole thing upside down.

Before I have a chance to get freaked out and eight-point turn the truck around, I'm breaking through the trees, and there it is.

The house is enormous. Giant like it should have been a hotel. A hostel. An orphanage. There have got to be fifty rooms, and there are windows everywhere. There's a big wide porch and a big gabled roof. It would almost look elegant with those columns, the black shutters, and the red door, except that the paint is peeling, and the stairs are sagging, and a few of those shutters are hanging on by a thread. It looks fancy from far away and kind of shitty the closer I get. The truck crawls to a halt in the grassy driveway, and I stare up at the place, expecting crows on the roof and ghosts in the windows and something living underneath the porch. I can't believe he lives here because no one should live here.

It's definitely haunted.

"You're here."

I scream. Loudly. And almost faint. There are stars and black fuzz; everything warps wildly. I'm pretty sure my heart fled clear down to my feet. My stomach is in my mouth, and all of my blood in in my brain. Edward puts a hand on my back through my open window as I fight to regain my breath. I push him away, flapping my hands in the air like a drowned bird.

"I'm fine. I'm fine," I pant, my vision stabilizing, and my heart slowly edging back into its proper place between my lungs.

"I'm sorry. I forget that hu-" His eyes go wide, and he lets out a sharp breath. " _Girls_ ," he corrects himself. "I forget that girls startle so easily."

"It's not just _girls_ ," I hiss, resisting the urge to call him a sexist jerk. Or worse. "I'm pretty sure anyone would freak out if you snuck up on them like that."

"I think it's fair to say that you snuck up on me, too. What are you doing here?"

"You've been to my house," I say, and even though I don't mean for it to, my voice sounds accusing anyway. I get out of the truck, the cool air on my flushed cheeks making my skin sweaty and goosebumped.

"I like your house better."

"Why?" I ask. My house could fit in the living room of his. My house has a rotting foundation and asbestos siding and the non-existent ghost of an eight-year-old. It might not be haunted the way his is, but it feels emptier somehow.

"Because you're there." His answer is absent and thoughtless, as though it came easy without a bunch of justifying, convincing, or even editing. Like he meant it. Like he didn't even think for a moment about _not_ saying it. I blush. Hard. Cheeks flaming and ears on fire and I shuffle in the overgrown grass beside him, fingering the frayed edges of my cut-off shorts and resisting the urge to cross my arms over my chest.

My scuffed up sneakers are just inches away from his shiny shoes.

There's something about him that makes me feel clumsy and unpolished. Like I shouldn't be here in my chucks and unbrushed hair. Like I should be dressed in some fancy black ball gown, reclining on a velvet fainting couch with pearls around my neck and a glass of something alcoholic in my hand. Like my hair should be in ringlets and my nails should be painted.

Like I should be elegantly anguished, but I'm not.

I'm just disheveled anxiety.

"You're not going to invite me inside?" I rub the top of my sneaker against the back of my leg.

"I don't think that's a good idea," he says, taking a sharp step back like he's worried I might try to tarnish his virtue or take advantage of his virginal heart or something. He has his hands in his pockets and his eyes on his shoes, and I expect a blush, but it doesn't happen. Instead, he goes grey.

"Why not? I won't try to kiss you or anything," I tease, slapping on a forced grin because I'd actually thought about doing exactly that on the way here. The faint disappointment that I won't get to do such a thing is stronger than I thought it would be.

"That's a shame." He stares at me so hard I swear he's going to burn a hole right through me.

"Why isn't it a good idea then? Me coming inside?"

He glances toward the house, the big dark windows and the heavy red door, his face puckered and his hands twitching nervously at his sides.

"Haunted, remember?"

* * *

I go home and spend the entire night wondering what he meant by "That's a shame."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **There is only one Hadley and she is incomparable.**

 **Thanks to her, this is not just one big long giant run-on-sentence (because, let's be honest, that's how I write.)**


	16. Chapter 16

I'm staking out Mike Newton.

He's got all the makings of a murderer. The too-big ego. The too-small brain. The rage issues and the big hands and the same size shoe as that bootprint in my front yard. He has a shed he's been building in the backyard for over a year now that is full of tools like hammers to bash in brains and hacksaws to cut off limbs and screwdrivers to pick locks with. He has his cop knowledge of crime scenes and blood splatters and fingerprints.

He probably has a copy of _Catcher in the Rye_ underneath his pillow.

Newton's house was given to him by his grandparents. Actually they died, in all honesty, and no one wanted it because his grandmother had a fondness for pink chintz, and his grandfather adored his cigars, and by the time they passed, the house was a monument to shitty interior decorating and stale tobacco. It could only be described as gingerbread fabulous, all the scalloped edges and rose-colored siding, but it smelled like the wrong end of an ashtray so it sat on the market for six years before Newton's parents gave up on selling it and just passed the whole mess on to their son.

"Get off my lawn, kid."

I've been watching him hulk around the yard for almost an hour now. He's holding a beer bottle and kicking at lumps of grass and mumbling under his breath. He has basically let the place go to shit. The pink paint is peeling, and the roof is missing shingles, and the once manicured lawn is now just weeds and overgrown contempt. He's standing in the middle of his shit pile, staring at me.

"I'm not a kid!" I flip him off with both hands and take two steps backward until my feet hit the road, which is public property. I keep my fingers in the air.

"You're too young for me, Swan." He grins like a leech. Like a pedophile. Like a sex addict who likes to lick toes, and his eyeballs rub all over me while his tongue swipes his lips. It's enough to make my stomach roll right over.

"Gross, Newton." I struggle not to shudder.

"Aw, you know why you're here." He's slurring his words, and his thumb is stroking the side of that beer bottle, and I wish I could kick him in the mouth.

"I do. But you don't." I glance toward the shed, wishing so so bad I could get inside it to find something, _anything_ , to prove that this guy is a psychotic dickwad, if not a murderer.

I head into the woods, aiming like a crow for home, knowing I'm going to have to do some bushwhacking because the last thing I want right now is for my dad to see me hoofing it along the empty roadway. He'd flash his lights and probably flip the siren once to get my attention and then interrogate me the whole way home to find out why I didn't ask for the truck again.

No way am I explaining today to him.

 _Oh, and by the way, Dad, your deputy probably murdered Alice._

Newton might actually be a waste of my time. Maybe it's all a waste of my time. Three years is too long, and evidence might only be a figment of my imagination. Even if I found Alice, did I really want to find her? Maybe I was better off as an only child. Maybe I was better off not being someone's older sister because lord, did she annoy the fuck out of me most of the time with her shitty pop music and her crappy clothing choices and her incessant need to be right all the time.

She probably felt the same way about me.

Would Alice keep looking? If it was all switched around, and we swapped places, would she keep looking for me? Would she want me back bad enough to stake out Newton or follow moldy Matthew Blanchard from his trailer to the bar and then back again like five thousand times? Would she tag along with Dad on call-ins just in case something seemed familiar? Would she have gone through my room and taken what she wanted before the door got shut and never re-opened?

"You're wasting your time."

I scream. Turn and swing out with a balled-up fist and connect with something rock hard and freezing cold and oh god, it hurts. My fear scream turns to a pain scream, and Edward is standing there in front of me with a shocked look on his face like he really didn't expect that sort of reaction. I'm not sure what he thinks should happen when he sneaks up on people like he does.

He didn't even have the decency to wince.

"You have _got_ to stop doing that." I glare at him, nursing my aching fist. It feels like I punched a brick wall. Edward shrugs and looks back toward Newton's house, now just a few pink spots of color through the trees. He sighs heavily, shakes his head, and looks back at me.

"He's bad news; you should stay away from him."

"No shit... he's a fucking loser," I grumble. "But that doesn't mean he couldn't kill someone."

"What makes you so sure?"

"That shed. He's hiding something."

"Maybe, but probably not."

My throat tightens, and my heart slows. My eyes narrow, and I'm scowling at him.

"For someone who doesn't know anything, you sure do seem to know a lot," I accuse him. "If you're not going to help me, then you're just hurting me."

He says nothing. Not one fucking word, and his face is that infuriating beautiful blank slate. I make an awkward animal noise in my throat that's all frustration and exhaustion and turn around to stomp my chucks and my cut-offs and all my self-righteous rage back home so that I can ice my hand, cry into my sheets, and maybe take a shower for the first time in a week. Instead, I march my sorry ass right into a thicket of blackberries, getting tangled and torn. I have to fight my way out of the damn bush like I'm in a wrestling match with a heavyweight twice my size. Edward just stands there and watches me, hands in his pockets, shoulders kind of slumping.

"You'll hurt yourself if you struggle." He makes like he's going to step forward and disentangle me from the hell-bush, just one hesitant foot forward, but he stops himself mid-movement when I finally wrench myself free.

"Leave me alone," I spit, near tears, my lips trembling the way they do when I'm about to lose my shit entirely. "Ow," I moan, biting back tears and clutching my wrist while a slow slip of blood drips toward my ankle.

That's when everything changes.

Edward is suddenly ten feet away, a leap so fast I couldn't even see it. He's paler than ever, gone white and grey as the last winter's snowdrifts, his eyes big and dark and round. He's shaking, a tremble from head to foot like we're in the middle of a blizzard and not the hot, humid forest. He's got his hand over his mouth like he's trying to keep himself from screaming.

He looks like he just watched someone disembowel a cat.

"What's wrong with you?" I ask.

Edward's eyes blink once, twice, once more, and he makes this sad, empty sound in his throat as he lowers his hand. His mouth is open, and his lips are still grey, and there's two big sharp teeth pricking the swell of his bottom lip and what the fuck am I even looking at right now?

"Holy fuck."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **What the what?!**

 **Love you, HH. Today and always forevermore.**


	17. Chapter 17

**Dear self,**

Edward is a vampire.

Holy.

 _Fuck_.

Edward is a vampire.

 **Sincerely,**

 **Yourself**

* * *

When I wake up, I'm in the park.

It's the one down on Mill Street with the dogwoods that don't flower, the fountain that never runs, and the infestation of mourning doves. The playground equipment is super outdated, wood and metal, and falling over. It's on the south side of town, and no one ever plays here because a herd of elk like to sleep here, which means the grass is forever littered with poop. I'm lying underneath the swing set, wood chips under my knees and elbows, the swings creaking above my head.

I take a mental inventory before I try to move.

I have my blue sweats on. The legs are hiked up around my knees. I have no shirt on, but I'm wearing one of my fancy lace bras. The underwire on the right side is popped out, stabbing me in the rib. I have gloves on, Dad's old stinky wool ones, but I'm only wearing one sock. If I had a mirror, I'd know for certain I had a black eye. At the moment, without a mirror and judging just by the pain, I'm 98% certain I have a black eye. I press my fingers gently all around the socket, and it smarts fire across my forehead.

"Hey."

"What the fuck?" I scream, scrabbling away from the disembodied voice of Edward somewhere to my right. Pain darts through my hand and up my arm and lodges at the base of my skull, setting off flashes behind my eyes and making the whole world tilt oddly to the side. My eye throbs; my left foot is numb, and my head is full of buzzing like there's an angry swarm of bees trapped between my ears.

"Are you ok?" he asks, and I roll my eyes. What a fucking stupid question. I wrap my arms around my chest, suddenly freezing.

"No. Do I look ok?" I grumble, trying not to cry.

"No. You don't." He shakes his head and shrugs out of his jacket. I expect to be enveloped in warmth, but I'm not. It's just cold. Cold like he left the jacket in his car all night long. I push my arms through the sleeves anyway, still struggling not to cry. Everything is terrible. I'm cold, sore, and barely dressed. Edward is in that same fucking suit and looks just as beautiful as ever.

I am like a whale that intentionally beached itself for no good reason.

"Why are you here?" I ask glumly, inspecting my feet. They're covered in mud and blood, and I don't even want to know which route I took to get here.

"I followed you."

"You followed me?"

 _Great_.

Edward nods but doesn't elaborate. I don't know what I just did or how long I did it for, but I am missing suspicious pieces of clothing, and I'm at least a mile and half from home. Nothing about the last few hours could have been that innocent.

"What happened?" I ask, curious. The walking is like a big, empty, black hole I can't see the bottom or even the top, and I want to know. Sort of. Mostly. Maybe not. But I can't help the curiosity: it's like a leech you only realize is sucked to your leg when you're out of the water and walking home. It's like the sewing needle you lost two months ago that suddenly stabs you, even though you've sat in the same spot on the couch a million times since then. It's like that yowling alley cat you wished death upon for months and then, one night, it's gone, and you kind of miss it.

"You left your house. Took off some clothes. Walked here. Fell off that slide." He looks up at the old rickety slide that is way too high and steep to be safe for children. No wonder my foot is numb. No wonder my underwire is poking out, and my eye is black, and my head is full of bees.

"What are you looking for when you walk?" he asks me.

"How should I know?" I snap, my voice hard as rock. My face feels even harder, like I was cut from limestone a billion centuries old. I want to tell him to shut up. Want to tell him to keep talking. To leave me alone, but don't go too far. To walk me home, but stay a safe distance away. I want to tell him to fuck off and never talk to me again, but I also really want to kiss him. I feel bad about being a giant ball of contradiction and huff out a bunch of air, picking dried bits of mud off my feet. "Alice, probably," I admit.

"Why do you want to find her so badly?"

"You mean besides the fact that she's my little sister?" I glare at him. _Duh_.

I stare off at the playground equipment, the gentle sway of a swing and the moonlight reflection on the old metal slide, and I hate this place. Hate it because it was always Alice's favorite. She never wanted to go to the newer, fancier park on the other side of town: the one with the new plastic slides, swings shaped like armchairs, and cushy rubber matting beneath the equipment. No, she liked this park with the damn doves, the elk poop, and the wood that gave you splinters when you rubbed up against it too hard. I think about Rose. Not about her dead and face down in my living room but about her frizzy red hair and double-colored eyes and twisted front tooth and that Alice was the only other kid I ever saw her with.

"She was a good kid, you know? I mean, annoying as fuck, but a good kid. She liked to play dress up, pretend she was a princess or a doctor or an alien. She gave me shit if I picked flowers. She ate whatever gross dinner my mother made and didn't complain about it like I did. She was always hanging out with the weird kids. She was sweet to everyone. She was just... _good_ , you know?"

"And what if you don't like what you find?" he asks, which is the shittiest question because it's the only one I haven't asked myself yet and for good reason. I imagine Alice with mummy skin. As a pile of bones. Buried, or maybe not buried. There's still some slim possibility that she's not actually dead, but even I'm beginning to accept that this possibility is fading rapidly. She's probably dead. And probably a sudsy pile of soap. But I still have to look.

"I don't know," I sigh. "But I have to find her."

I look over at Edward, and he's watching me. Hard. Eyes on my mouth like he could understand me better if he saw the words leaving my lips. He's licking his own lips like he's hungry, and it's that exact moment that I remember he's a vampire.

"Don't get any funny ideas," I snap, my hands clamping around my neck to hide my thumping pulse, and Edward blinks, his eyes returning to mine and his eyebrows high in his forehead.

"I wasn't - I wasn't getting funny ideas," he stutters, which I thought he was too cool and collected to do. "I can feel your heart," he finally says.

"What the fuck do you mean, you can _feel_ it?" I'm looking at him like he's crazy because who says stuff like that? Guys in knockoff Lifetime movies, that's who. Vampires who are like a hundred years old and don't know how fucking creepy they sound when they say stuff like that, that's who.

"I can feel it beating. It's going too fast. You should take some deep breaths, calm down." He sounds like he's giving me instructions on how to install a car battery.

"You say the creepiest shit sometimes."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hadley, oh Hadley.**

 **Have I mentioned lately that I love her?** **Have I mentioned there's no one else above her?**

 **I have?**

 **Well, let me say it again.**

 **I love her. There's no one else. She is my favorite.**


	18. Chapter 18

We're halfway through dinner, spaghetti again, when the doorbell rings.

Dad looks up at me, and I look up at him because no one has ever rung our doorbell at seven o'clock at night. It sends me into an immediate panic, and I can see the same in him but probably for different reasons. We both stand at the same time, chairs scraping in unison, and I follow him to the front door. I wait for him to reach for his gun, but he doesn't. He just opens the door wide, and a wave of cold air hits me before I have a chance to peek around him.

Edward is standing there in all his pale, perfect, undead glory.

"What are you doing here?" I gape from behind Dad, and Edward's eyebrows furrow in the center. He ignores me completely and sticks his hand out into the air between him and my dad, clearing his throat.

"My name is Edward Cullen, sir. You must be Chief Swan."

Dad wipes his hand on the napkin still in his fist and returns Edward's handshake. I'm not sure if he notices how cold Edward is because I can't see his face. It must not have struck him as that odd because the next thing I know he's inviting Edward inside, and the three of us are in the kitchen, and I'm sitting in front of my half-eaten spaghetti, totally grossed out because all of a sudden it looks like someone's bloody insides instead of tomato-dredged pasta.

Dad is asking Edward if he's hungry.

 _Jesus_.

"No, but thank you. I ate before I came over." Edward's eyes skirt to me, and I resist the urge to laugh because I don't even want to know what he means by that. "It looks delicious, however."

That time, I do laugh. Just once before I clamp my hand over my traitorous mouth. Both Dad and Edward are looking at me like I'm crazy. A vampire calling my bloody linguini delicious is the funniest thing I've heard in a long, long time.

Dad shrugs and goes back to his dinner, talking to his pasta. "So, Edward, haven't seen you around these parts before. Where are you from?"

"Originally from here," Edward says. "But we moved away when I was quite young. I've only recently returned."

"And your parents? What do they do?" Dad is fishing for info but making it seem innocent by not staring Edward down, or giving him the full-blown hands-on-the-table, mustache-twitching, good cop interrogation.

"They've both passed, unfortunately." Edward actually looks sad. It's the first bit of vague emotion I've ever really seen on him, and he actually looks human all of a sudden. Not so hard or cold or heartless, but soft and weary and remorseful.

"Sorry to hear that, son." Dad sounds sympathetic. He understands. Both his parents are dead too, and he knows what that kind of hole feels like. Edward looks away, toward the kitchen window, speaking to neither of us.

"It's better this way. They were very sick." He looks back at Dad, who is still just staring at his dinner, and then at me. "I've inherited their house," he says, his eyes locked with mine. "I do believe I plan to stay."

"Well, what exactly brings you to my kitchen tonight?" Dad slurps up more spaghetti and gets some in his mustache and all over his lips. His table manners suck, but it's only been me all these years, and the sudden company has obviously caught him off guard.

"I came to ask you for something." Edward's eyes dart to me again, and oh, my god, he's going to ask my dad if he can marry me. That's what olden time guys did, right? Go ask the girl's dad for permission to marry them? I shake my head at him, and he's shaking his back at me, and I'm not ready to get married because I haven't even kissed this guy. I haven't even kissed _any_ guy. That's like buying a car before you even test drive it. That's like buying a house when you've only seen a photo of the outside, and you don't know if there's mold in the walls or birds in the chimney or a body buried in the basement.

"I was hoping Bella might accompany me tonight. I have an errand to run, and I need another pair of hands."

 _Well, that sounds suspicious._

"Help with what, exactly?" Dad's eyebrows are hung low, and his cop 'stache is twitching, and I am obviously his daughter because he's just as suspicious as I am.

"I have a car stuck, just a few miles out of town." Edward tilts his head toward the east side of the room.

"I'm not sure Bella's the best kind of help for that sort of thing. She doesn't even know how to double pump a clutch. Why don't I come help you?" Dad starts to stand, and Edward throws a hand out into the air to stop him.

"Oh, sir, no. I only need her to sit in the front seat and steer while I tow it home. Easy enough, I figured." He looks over at me, and he has no idea how limited my driving experience is. Dad does, though. He throws me right under the bus.

"She can barely drive a stick."

"Not to worry. It's an automatic." Edward's grin is big and wide and can mean nothing but trouble.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, we're walking through the woods, the leaves crunchy and the fog thick and the sound of my breath whistling by my ears. For some reason, Edward decided to get his car stuck at the top of a friggin' mountain. I am so out of shape. He's walking along like it's nothing, and I'm not sure I can feel my knees. I'm about to scramble over a fallen tree when his hand appears in front of me, and before I can even think about it, I'm taking it, letting him hoist me over. His other hand brushes my back, and I'm in knots as my feet touch back down on solid ground.

What happens next is awkward.

And epic.

And weird and wonderful and terrible.

It's like we're having a staring contest, or maybe we're checking each other out because our eyes meet, and our mouths close. We're just standing there in the woods looking hard at each other like we're only just seeing ourselves for the first time ever. He's all tucked in and tamed, his eyes solemn and his suit pressed, while I'm… I'm a mess, as ever. Untied shoes and hair in tangles. Ratty cut-off jeans and an old black T-shirt that's been through the laundry so many times it's basically grey. I can't even remember if I washed my face this morning.

I swear to god, my heart is burning.

"I don't understand you." I pull away, feeling hot and flustered and like I need twelve times more air than I'm actually getting.

"I'm pretty straight forward, Bella. What you see is what you get." He shrugs, seemingly untouched by my statement.

"Why do you keep coming around?" I ask. "I thought you would have gotten sick of me by now."

"I don't think that's going to happen." Edward shakes his head. "I like you."

"What could you possibly like about me?" I want to laugh out loud. I want to hit him or blush or maybe try to kiss him and then run far, far away. I don't even understand myself anymore.

"Your face," he says, simply.

"Funny, that's the part of me that I hate the most," I grumble, definitely going red.

"That's exactly why I like it."

That was either really sweet, or maybe sort of romantic even. He looks completely sincere, and his tongue is on his bottom lip again. I am starting to understand that he only does that when he's feeling something especially true.

"What are we doing? I thought we were here to rescue a car." I change the subject. It's the only thing I can do to save face. To break the awkward tension. To take the focus off my face because it's just full of freckles and black bags under my eyes and chapped lips, and who would even like it? Certainly not me. And if I don't like my face, how could anyone else?

Edward blinks and swallows something before he turns and starts pulling branches from the giant pile of shrubbery beside us. Big branches, tree-sized ones, and he just tosses them aside like they're matchsticks. Like it's nothing to pick up a friggin' tree. I watch him dig through the pile, dismantling it to show me what is buried underneath.

It's a car.

Slumped on flat tires with peeling paint and a busted out windshield. It was probably blue once, but it's so dirty and rusted over, it's practically brown. I can't even see through the windows. The antenna is snapped in half, and the door handle on the passenger's side is hanging by a single skinny cord. The silver hub caps are speckled in red rust and the rubber tires are so brittle they're cracked through. Something is skittering around inside, a masked raccoon face peering through the dirty windows.

"This is your car?" Why the fuck we're here to save this piece of junk, I do not know.

"Not exactly." Edward shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn't look at me. It's becoming more and more obvious to me that we're not here to pull the car home.

"Then whose is it?"

"It belonged to the guy who took your sister."

The bottom falls out. Or maybe it's the whole earth that shivers. Maybe gravity suddenly upended, and I'm really hanging off the ground, rather than standing on it. I sink to my knees so I don't fall face first into the dirt. My heart races around, banging up against the cage of my ribs, while my stomach does flip flops, and my guts twist up in double knots.

I'm not sure if I need to puke, scream, or pass out.

"How do you know that?" I ask, everything spinning wildly. I dig my fingers through the dirt and the leaves just to feel something solid, hoping it will hold me upright.

"Because I was there."

" _Where_?"

Edward just blinks.

I gasp. "That night?"

He nods, his eyes steady and black, and I remember him telling me that I stabbed him. Remember the night he showed up looking like a vacuum salesman or a Mormon missionary, and instead of scamming my credit card or selling off my soul, he helped me unearth a bloody knife in the pitch black dark of the forest.

"It was _your_ blood on my kitchen floor?"

"No." He shakes his head as he kneels beside me and takes my hand, rubbing his fingertips along the throbbing veins on the soft underside of my wrist like he's checking my pulse. My blood feels like it's boiling, bubbling through me like a flash flood of water rushing through a skinny canyon. Not the way blood is supposed to move, soft and slow. Edward looks worried.

"But I stabbed you?" I'm fumbling for more than air here, my lungs and my brain working at the same laboriously slow pace.

"I have no blood to bleed, Bella."

"Then whose was it?"

"A man from Seattle." He looks away toward the car like there's a lot more to say.

"Who was he?"

"A nobody. A smoker. A drinker. An abusive bastard with a beaten-up wife at home."

"How'd he - "

"I killed him," Edward snaps. "Fed. When you stabbed me, I was full of him."

"Oh. Oh, I see," I stammer, even though I don't see at all.

I don't see anything.

I think he just told me that he ate someone.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Ok, so - I guess it's worth noting here that my head-vampires do not exactly coincide with SM's. Just a thought.**

 **Also - Hadley: omg my love is real.**


	19. Chapter 19

A few things about Edward.

 **One.**

He doesn't eat people. Unless you're a murdering asshole from Seattle.

 **Two.**

He actually eats animals. He likes bunnies. They taste like clover and sweet green grass and flowers. He likes mountain lions because their blood is rich and thick and tastes like the top of the food chain. He likes bears for the same reason. He likes foxes, the little red ones, because they make him feel slick and sly and somehow invisible.

He hates deer. They taste like dirt.

 **Three.**

The image of him wrestling a bear is simultaneously the scariest and the sexiest thing I've ever imagined.

 **Four.**

When he met that guy in the woods that night, in the dark, he hadn't eaten in sixty-seven days.

 **Five.**

He was starving. Literally.

 **Six.**

There's this thing called bloodlust. It's like sex. Like the thrill of skydiving or delivering a baby or injecting yourself with speed. It's blinding and wicked and completely incredible. It's unstoppable, and you wouldn't want to stop it anyway. Bloodlust is what made Edward attack that guy out there. He didn't want to, but he didn't have much of a choice. He was hungry and smelled blood - pure, clean, bright blood - and he just couldn't help it.

 **Seven.**

The blood Edward smelled wasn't the guy's blood at all.

It was Alice's.

* * *

"How do you think it all began?" I ask him, leaning up against the shitty car. The dark is creeping in, and the shadows are melting together, and the evening birdsong is starting to slowly fade away. I'm trying to comb through my knotted hair with my fingers because if I don't do something with my hands, I'm gonna go crazy. I'm pulling out more hair than I am untangling, dropping tufts of curls all around me.

"How did what all begin?"

"Everything. The earth. The sky and the sun."

"Why?" Edward peers at me through the gloom like he doesn't trust where I'm heading with this.

"Because I feel really fucking small right now," I grumble.

"You're not small. No one is small." Edward sounds sad when he says it, staring off into the dark again, but I know he's not seeing the forest, or the trees or the moonlight. He's seeing a couple lifetimes worth of people and places and moments. "No matter how insignificant a life might seem, every person touches someone. Changes someone. For better or worse."

"Am I changing you?" I ask.

"I can't be changed."

"So you're changing me, then?"

"Yes." He sighs before he nods.

"For better? Or worse?"

"I think that's still up for debate."

* * *

By the time I get home, it's pitch black and nearly dawn. I stayed out in the woods by that car for a long, long time, Edward staring at me silently while I sat in the rotting leaves wishing that things could be different. Wishing that I could be normal, and he could just be some regular guy instead of this undead version of a person who drank blood to stay alive. Wishing that we didn't spend what could have easily been considered a first date leaning up against the shitty old car of the guy who probably murdered my sister.

Edward walked me home. Actually, it's more like he led me through the pitch black forest because I probably would have gotten lost on my own. Before he left, he started to reach for me, and I flinched. I didn't mean it. It just happened. Like my body wasn't prepared for anyone to cozy up to it. If I was a forest, I was cold and dark and full of animals with sharp teeth. If I was an ocean, I was the deepest, coldest part, full of icebergs and prehistoric monsters. If I was a castle, I was surrounded by moats, brambles, and dragons that breathed fire.

If I was a girl, I sure didn't fucking act like it.

He left with his hands in his pockets and his chin on his chest.

I stand on the sidewalk, staring at my humble little home, and even though I know it's ok, even though I know it's nearly impossible it could ever happen again, even though I know that Alice is gone and can't be murdered twice, I don't want to go in. Everything feels the same. The air. The ground. The sky and stars and universe squashing me into the dirt. Everything feels just like it did that night, and I'm having a hard time separating the two. Then from now. Here from there. That version of me and this version.

This is the moment I decide that maybe I didn't want to find Alice.

Mostly because I don't know what I might find.

* * *

 **Dear Self,**

The last thing you should be doing right now, the very last thing in the whole entire world you should be doing right now, is falling for a vampire. You probably shouldn't be falling for anyone, while we're at it, but a vampire is definitely one of the worst choices you could make.

Who even does that?

You.

 _You_ do things like that. Stupid things. Things that could probably get you killed. Or sucked dry. Or worse. I mean, what is eternal damnation, after all? Whatever it is, it's gotta be kind of miserable and neverending and probably really fucking lonely. What happened when everyone you knew died, leaving you? When the whole world changed, and you either had to keep up or go crazy?

Edward is 107 years old. He's been through two world wars. There weren't even cars when he was born. Smallpox was still a thing. Prohibition and the Depression and Revolutions. Electricity and phones and televisions. His family has been dead for a century, so there's a small part of you that feels bad for him and the empty existence he's been shuffling through for longer than you've even been alive.

Another part, a bigger part, is full to the very brim with curiosity.

How the fuck could this ever even work out? How could a vampire, all stone and teeth and ancient, brittle feelings, ever fall for a human? Is that what is happening here? The way he looks at you, the way he reaches for you and then touches you like you're the most fragile, breakable, on-the-verge-of-sudden-death thing in his whole existence. It's sort of sweet and scary and a whole lot of fucking weird. Weird, like you want more, even when you want it to stop. Weird, like you'd eat yourself to death on something you hate the taste of. Like you'd sleep your life away, despite nightmares that will never let up.

Like you're willing to scrap it all on the very thing that could quite possibly be the worst for you.

And how is a human supposed to love a vampire, anyway? He's a million times older and probably a thousand times wiser and definitely a hundred times better-looking than you could ever hope to be. He's the diamond, and you're just cut plastic. He's the Rembrandt, and you're the crummy painting they bolt to the hotel wall. It's the most uneven situation you could possibly put yourself in. You might never be enough. You might never be even. You'll always be struggling just to feel equal.

The only way to ever be equal would be to let him turn you into a vampire too.

Which is scary as shit to your feeble human brain.

So what the fuck are you doing? Why are you encouraging this? Why are you lying in your bed at night imagining him wrestling a bear with your hand buried beneath your underwear and your breath all caught up in your lungs? Why are you wondering what it would feel like to be kissed by him? Bitten by him? Absolutely and utterly devoured by him? Pushed up to the point of orgasm or death or maybe even eternal life by whatever was hiding behind his lips?

Why?

Because you're you, that's why.

And even you can fantasize about something other than soap.

 **Sincerely,**

 **You**

* * *

 **AN:**

 **I should be doing laundry. Or cleaning the kitchen. Or shoveling the eight gazillion tons of snow outside.**

 **Instead, I'm hunched over my keyboard, tap tap tapping away while the baby sleeps.**

 **One big, loud round of applause for Hadley, who spends hours (literally HOURS) on the phone with me, plotting and giggling and just generally loving the shit outta me. I'd be a lost mess without her.**


	20. Chapter 20

I show up at Edward's at six-thirty in the morning.

Actually, I wake up there in the driver's seat of my truck, my forehead on the steering wheel. I can't even remember driving here. Can't remember getting in the truck to begin with. If I don't actually walk, can it be called sleepwalking? Is there such a thing as sleep driving?

If there is, I think I just did it.

I blink against the sunlight, the bright bite of unfiltered morning. It's so early, the birds aren't even out yet, but the time isn't important. Vampires don't sleep, right? My head is still reeling, my heart is still pounding, and my blood still isn't pushing through me just right. I still can't believe last night. The car. The leaves. The changing of him, or me, or maybe both of us. The reaching for me and then the pulling away.

Next time he reaches, I'm not flinching.

"Took you long enough." Edward grins as he opens the creaky truck door, like he was expecting me or something. My smile comes on so fast I can feel it burning up my face.

"It's like the crack of fucking dawn," I say.

I don't ask; I just head for the house. He's still standing by the truck, watching me, when I make it up the wide front steps to the door. I look at him once, with my hand on the knob, before I give it a solid twist, giving him more than enough time to stop me. But he doesn't. So I twist and push and step into a house that smells like a hundred years of discontent and thousand times more dust.

I flop down on a sofa covered with a sheet, white once but now age-stained and grey, squatting in the middle of a moth-eaten living room. I wring my hands and chew on my cheeks, staring at a spot on the tattered carpet. I have ten million questions to ask him, but I can't get a single one of them into words and out of my mouth.

"You seem… frustrated," he offers. I'm starting to understand he has more access to my emotions than maybe even I do. I bet my heart is skipping along too quick, and my blood is pumping too fast, and my brain is full of anxiety.

"I _am_ frustrated."

"About me?" he asks.

"Sometimes," I huff. "But mostly, it's Alice. I'm like a dog chasing its tail, just circles that get me nowhere."

"Maybe you should… stop." He hesitates before the last word.

"I can't. I can't stop. If I stop, I'll have nothing else."

Edward makes a noise in the back of his throat that sounds like a sigh of pain and rubs a fist into his palm, staring at his feet for a long time before he looks up at me. "I have someone you should meet."

I wait for this someone to enter the room, expecting a relative, an aunt or a cousin, a grandparent or even another vampire, one who is just as ageless and perfect and pale. But the house is silent and still. No echoing footsteps. No quiet shuffles. Instead, Edward stands and holds a hand out in my direction.

I think I'm supposed to take it, but I just stare.

"Come with me," he says, and I stand but keep my hands to myself. Something about his voice is telling me what is about to happen isn't exactly good. Something about his face, the clamp of his jaw, the hard in his eyes, is telling me what is about to happen is probably really fucking bad.

When we step outside, the fog feels like a kiss: heavy and wet and thick enough to leave a mark. If I squint hard enough, I could be anywhere. If I pretend fiercely enough, I could be anything. Edward steps down off the porch, and I follow. He walks slowly toward the woods, his shoes leaving a trail in the dewdrop grass, and his shoulders slicing through the fog. I stay close behind him because my stomach has gone wobbly, and my heart is racing, and I'm scared with no real reason to be, which means I probably have a lot of reasons to be.

"There," he says, and I look around his arm, searching until I spot something. Someone. Just a few yards away, a silhouette against the grey. Short. Small. With a turned up nose and short choppy hair and…

"No," I sob, clutching Edward's arm to stay upright.

She's standing at the edge of the trees, barefoot with her hair in knots, stooped over just a little like there's something really interesting at her feet. She is wearing a white nightgown that certainly isn't hers, but she probably loves it anyway, ribbons and lace around the neck and arms. She looks skinny, like she hasn't eaten in days, the bones in her wrists standing too tall and the hollows in her cheeks falling too deep. The bags under her eyes are purplish-bruised, and her skin is as pale as Edward's. Something on the breeze catches her attention, her nose lifting higher and her nostrils flaring, as her head turns and our eyes lock.

Her eyes are as red as our blood-drenched kitchen.

"Alice," Edward says, low and menacing. There's a sharp edge to his voice, like he's warning her. Her eyes dart to him, just for a moment, before they're locked back on me. Her lips drop open, and her jaw unhinges so far that a wicked black hole appears where her tiny, babbling mouth used to be.

"No, no, no," I wheeze, my throat so tight I can barely breathe.

Alice takes a step towards us, but she sure doesn't look like she wants hugging or kissing or some other sisterly reunion. Instead, she looks like a cat that just spotted a mouse. A lion that just spotted a weak, wounded antelope, separated from the herd. Her shoulders hunch, and her red eyes go bottomless, and if she had fur, it would be standing upright. She even does that wiggle, her back end moving as her front end catches up, and before I can even comprehend what that means, Edward shoves me.

Hard.

When I hit the grass, I hit it on hands and knees. There's screaming and growling and grunting coming from behind me, and when I look back over my shoulder, Edward and Alice are in a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Their arms are swinging, and their legs are kicking, and he's got her around the neck. I'm about to tell him to let her go, not to hurt her, when I notice that her eyes are locked on me, and her hands are reaching for my hair. Her mouth isn't full of her crooked square white teeth, but instead, she's sprouted these giant fucking fangs. At the very moment I realize it, when I really comprehend just what the fuck is going on, Alice breaks free and lunges for me.

I duck and throw my hands over my head.

Like that will help.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Dear Hadley,**

 **Thank you, thank you, thank you.**

 **Love,**

 **Me**


	21. Chapter 21

Alice's room is like a monument to pre-teen lust.

Everything is pink. Literally everything. The bedspread, the pillows, the curtains, the walls. Even the carpet is this horrid fuschia-colored shag she begged and begged for. Dad said it reminded him of the inside of a stomach, but he bought it anyway. When it came to Alice, he was a sucker. I guess we all were because I helped paint the walls, and Mom sewed the curtains, and Dad even found her a cheap plastic chandelier to hang over her bed.

Also pink.

Like a Pepto-Bismol nightmare, if you ask me.

We haven't touched it, Dad and I. Mom wanted to clean it out, strip the carpet, and repaint the walls, basically just erase any indication Alice ever lived there, but Dad wouldn't let her. He grabbed her wrists and hauled her back into the hallway and screamed at her about the memory of their daughter and how if she killed it off, she was just as bad as the asshole who took Alice in the first place. He threatened to bar the door. Threatened to nail it shut. Threatened to move himself in there if he had to, just to keep it safe from her. That was the night the fighting started, and it never stopped, really. A screaming match in the hallway, and then Mom was drinking, drinking, drinking all day, every day, and then she was driving to the station to make a scene in front of all Dad's colleagues before she fled town and never came back.

All of it over Alice's ugly pink carpet.

But now, three years later, everything is covered in dust. The house always gets coated in a fine layer of ash from the lumber yards ten miles down the highway. I could never let it go long without wiping it away, or we'd drown in it. It turned the white enameled stove black. Turned the wooden windowsills grey. The mantle looked grimy all the time, and when I vacuumed, it came up in clouds.

The ash is so thick in Alice's room, I leave footprints.

The first thing I do is sit down on that ugly pink carpet, my back against the rose-colored footboard, and cry. I haven't cried over Alice. Not in three years. Not that night. Not the next day. Not at her funeral. Not on her birthdays. Not at Christmas. Not every time I caught my dad sitting in the dark with her stuffed bear or her hair bow or her sock in his hand, silent tears spilled all to himself.

If no one sees you cry, did it even happen?

My lack of tears at the funeral was what sparked it all. The town began to whisper, and then that whisper was a murmur, and then the murmur was just regular talking, and pretty soon the rumor mill was like a screaming banshee. It was a sign of a psychopath, the girl who couldn't even manage a tear over her poor, dead-but-not-dead sister. I was no better than a cold-hearted killer. Maybe I _was_ the cold-hearted killer. That day, the day of the funeral, as I was putting on my ugly blue dress and hating my knees and my face and my life, I never could have imagined this was where I'd end up.

Curled up in a ball on my sister's ash-covered carpet, crying over her fangs.

I scrub the salt from my cheeks and stand, puffs of ash rising around me as I wipe myself down. I get a backpack from her closet, pink, of course, decorated with purple flowers and a plastic pull on the zipper in the shape of a star. I put her favorite tulle skirt in the bottom, magenta-colored, and shove her pastel sweater in on top, the one with the sequins around the neck. She'd need socks and underwear, and all of those have pink ruffles on them somewhere, somehow. I pack her a pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts, My Little Pony and a blue one with a big gold bow printed on the front of it. I pack her jacket with the fake fur around the hood before I remember she's just cold anyway, forever, and probably doesn't need a jacket. I toss the jacket aside and shove in a few headbands, with big pink bows and pink ribbons on them.

I pack the dress I had thought we'd bury her in, the pink one with the hearts around the hem.

Just before I leave, I add her leopard, the one she had since she was a baby, to the backpack. Its name is Bubblegum, and it's barely pink anymore. More of a muted blush because a childhood of tea parties and backyard adventures means that the fur has gone ratty and discolored, and no amount of washing ever brought the beast back to its original glory.

I tuck that ratty leopard under my chin and cry some more.

What am I even doing? Alice tried to attack me half an hour ago, and here I am packing her clothing and wondering about underwear. Here I am crying into her stuffed animal. The only thing that stopped her was Edward. He held her long enough for me to run to my car, slam the door shut behind me, and get the lock thrown before she was up against the window, practically licking the glass, her eyes red and wild and her fingers clawing to get at me. Like a wild fucking animal. I just sat there with my hands on the wheel, watching her, feeling my insides curl up and crawl away somewhere to hide. My hope and my three years of searching and everything that gave me a purpose since she disappeared just up and died right there on the spot. Right between those two giant fangs in her mouth.

Alice is a vampire.

Part of me thinks this would have been easier if she was just a pile of soap.

* * *

Alice in sitting in the grass just off the porch, surrounded by piles of butter yellow dandelions. She's chaining them together, threading one through another through another. Chains around her wrists and around her head and looped around her neck. Chains around her ankles and strewn all around her in the grass. It's so normal, this dandelion thing, for a moment I almost forget that she tried to kill me yesterday.

I walk slowly off the porch, keeping my eyes on her. I know that Edward is close by, close enough to catch her if needed, but I wanted to do this on my own. I also know that Alice can smell me. Her shoulders stiffen, and her head turns just the tiniest bit, but she doesn't look at me as I settle into the grass a few yards away, moving slowly, like she's a motion-activated nuclear bomb.

"Hi," I say.

"Hi," she replies, not quite looking at me, continuing to thread her flowers.

"Do you know who I am?" I ask.

"My sister," she says. "You hated my music."

I nod because she's right. "Yeah. You hated mine."

"Because it sucked!" Alice snaps, baring her fangs. I didn't know much about becoming a vampire, but Alice has gone from eight to eighteen, and I didn't think that was part of the package. I scoot a couple inches away, like those two inches could give me a head start if I needed it, and try again.

"I'm really happy that you're not dead."

"That's what _you_ think," Alice responds, sounding sullen and pissy and mean. She looks at me then, her face a sick grey color, her eyes lifeless, and her hands limp in her lap. The pretty yellow flowers in her hair and around her neck do nothing to make her appear softer, or happier, or even as young as I know she is. Instead, she looks ancient.

"Is it ok I'm here?" I ask, wondering if I was just salt in a fresh wound, a sting she didn't exactly need right now.

"Edward said I'm not allowed to attack you. That I have to try to keep you safe." Alice looks back at me, and I swear to god, she licks her lips.

"Edward is a nice guy," I say, subtly scooting a few more inches away. I resist the urge to look toward the house because I bet Edward is standing there in the windows smiling at the words that just came out of my mouth. I still don't know what the fuck to think about him, but "nice" is the first word that comes to mind. I mean it in the way of " _Nice of him to save you_." " _Nice of him to befriend me_." " _Nice of him to tell me what the fuck happened to you_." " _Nice of him to keep you from killing me_."

"He makes me eat rabbits," Alice grumbles. That was probably the worst part about the entire situation for her. Forget the eternal damnation thing, or the whole allergy to sunlight problem, or the "I eat blood now" bit. It was the killing of small, cute, furry creatures that irked Alice the most. This small fact gives me some hope there's still some semblance of my sister in there.

"What do they taste like?" I ask this because I'm curious. Her answer makes my curiosity wither like an under-watered tree.

"They're so gross." She grimaces like there's something rotten in her mouth. "I bet you taste a lot better."

My mouth falls open. I know I should say something, anything, to distract or mollify or dissuade her, but I've got nothing. Just pure shock such a statement just came out of my little sister's mouth.

"I'll keep eating rabbits for Edward, though. I'm gonna marry him," Alice muses.

I look at her, and she's in dreamboat land. It's all hearts, flowers, and pre-teen fangirl love. Her hard face is soft, and her red eyes are kind of rose-colored, and she's got this weird grin on her face, making her look like a serial killer contemplating her next victim. She may be acting eighteen, but she still looks like she's eight. Her chest is flat, and her hips are skinny, and she hasn't even gotten acne.

"Have you told him this yet?" I ask.

"Yes. He said ok."

 _Oh, really?_

* * *

 **AN:**

 **I love Hadley and Hadley loves me and we are getting imaginary married.**

 **It's like real married, but not.**

 **Thank you for reading along.**

 **xo**

 **HBM**


	22. Chapter 22

I wake up on Newton's front porch.

It's the kind of dark that only happens at the very middle of the night, so black that everything is blue. The kind of dark that only happens at the very middle of the ocean, so blue that everything is black. All the windows are dark. I listen, but I can't hear anything. I know he's in there, Newton. Passed out on his couch, the carpet littered in spent 40s and half-smoked cigarettes. Asleep at the kitchen table with his hand down his pants and the remnants of a pint of whiskey spilled in front of him.

What a place for my head to take me.

What a place to wake up.

Everything is dark, but I can see him. Edward is standing in the grass just a few feet off the porch, his suit blending into the black and his skin glowing pale in the moonlight. The hollows of his eyes are midnight, and his mouth is a dark gash, and he's staring at me just the same way he always does, his face gone slack and his tongue edging his lips.

"You're always staring at me." I pull myself upright and take inventory. At least I'm wearing shoes. For that matter, at least I'm wearing clothing. At least I'm not naked, or half-naked. At least I'm on the porch and not inside the house.

"I can't help it," he says and shrugs like he doesn't think it bad or creepy, or like he's at the top of the food chain, and I'm at the bottom.

"It makes me nervous."

"Why?"

"Because sometimes it feels like you're planning on how to eat me."

"I suppose that hunger and adoration can look alike." He swallows hard, his throat flexing, and he's shrugging again. "Both are painful if left ignored for too long. Both make your insides twist up. Both leave you lightheaded and weak-kneed." His eyes meet mine. "It's been a long time, decades even, but I think I know what this is."

"What _what_ is?"

"I'm feeling very enamoured of you," he says. His hand drifts to his chest, and I wonder if he misses the feeling of his heartbeat, the thump under his ribs, or if it's been gone so long he can't even remember it.

"Can you speak in modern talk, please? This isn't 1915," I grumble.

"I like you, Bella. I like you a lot."

"You can't."

"Can't I?" His brows furrow, and he looks confused.

"No. You can't. Because you promised my sister you'd marry her." My mouth is so full of sarcasm, it almost chokes me.

"Bella," he sighs. "Be reasonable. She's eight."

"No shit," I snap. "That's why you don't promise to marry her."

Edward breathes deeply and looks up at the sky for a moment, shaking his head like he's waging some internal debate. "I'm going to tell you what it's like, what it was like for her. It won't be easy to hear, but I think you need to know." He looks right at me like I'm supposed to say something, supposed to tell him to go on, but I stay silent and scowling like we're in some gun-drawn duel. Like this is the Old West and we're ten paces apart in the dust rather than staring each other down from the yard of an asshole who, up until just a few days ago, I was convinced had murdered my sister.

"I'd just come back, that night. I do that, occasionally. Show up to check on things, make sure the house is still standing." He glances off into the tree in the general direction of his haunted-by-my-sister house. "Unfortunately, it still is."

"What does this have to do with Alice?" I'm tired and cold and beyond the point of wanting to think about that night anymore, or ever again. Nothing turned out like I thought it would, nothing was right side up or rational or made even the smallest amount of sense anymore. I'd give anything for a really bad case of amnesia right now, just so I could move on with my life.

"I ran into him, the man who broke into your house." Edward looks back at me. "It was dark. I was tired. And hungry. Very hungry. I hadn't eaten in months, and suddenly there was blood, blood that smelled pure and clean and delicious, and I... " He hesitates, swallowing hard before he continues. "I can't tell you how it takes over. How everything just stops. How nothing will satiate that kind of burn."

"You killed him," I say, my voice sounding as flat and dead as I feel.

"I drained him," Edward corrects me. "In less than a minute. I drained him dry, and it felt so good. There's nothing like it, Bella. Human blood. It's like a shot of lightning. Like swallowing a meteor or the sun. It makes me feel like I could move a mountain. Like I could fly if I wanted to. I couldn't stop. I needed more."

"More," I repeat.

"He had her with him. She was bleeding. The frenzy, it just - when I realized it was a girl I was drinking from, by the time I was full enough to stop, I had very nearly killed her." His voice is so low, I have to strain to hear him, and even then, I can barely believe it. "There wasn't even enough blood left for her heart to pump; she didn't have a pulse. She was grey and limp and so very near to gone that I bit her, as a last resort."

"Last resort to what?" I wheeze, my lungs empty, and my heart at a standstill. This is the moment. I know it. He is the harbinger of doom, the bearer of bad news, the straw that breaks the camel's back.

And I am the camel.

"Death," he says "It was either this, or death."

"I think I'd rather she be dead."

"Is that really true, though?" He peers at me through the dark, eyes wary and brow furrowed. "Because I've watched you look for her for three years, and you never gave up. Even when you should have, you never gave up on her. You kept looking. I think you believed she was alive."

"But she's _not_ ," I spit.

"Not in the way you're used to. But she's still here."

I glare at him. Narrow my eyes and harden my mouth and stick out my chin and glare. He huffs, something hard and harsh in his chest, and he just keeps talking rather than acknowledge me.

"When we change, it takes a few days. Nothing is immediate. Everything has to burn up for it to be replaced. It's wretched, painful in a way humans can't comprehend. And it's worse for children. Their tolerance is low." Edward looks off toward the woods as though he can see his house through the miles of trees. "She screamed for days," he says. "It was terrible."

"And ever since then?"

"I've been trying to teach her to control it, to curb her taste for humans, but it took twenty years of fasting for me to learn it myself. It's been difficult. I've been keeping her here, away from town, because she isn't ready yet. Sometimes she get so bad that I just have to tell her what she wants to hear. Of course I'm not going to marry her. "

"You've been up there for three _years_?" I screech. I can't even believe it. They were so close. This whole time they were so close, I could have found her if I'd only looked a little harder. I can't help but think about the first time I showed up at the creaky old house, and Edward told me the place was haunted. That I best not come inside.

Haunted, my ass.

Edward nods, looking glum. "She killed a hiker her first year, someone who wandered too close. A few months after that, she got a trucker who stopped on the highway to sleep. Then there were more hikers, a whole group, and she got all six of them. After that, we had a couple of quiet years, and she stayed inside mostly, but then last month she escaped to the reservation and attacked an old man in a wheelchair."

Oh god. It was _Alice_. All that time, it was her. The hikers, first the one, that guy from Montana they found high above the tree line, then the whole group from Utah. Everyone was so sure it had been a pack of wolves, possibly rabid, because there was so little of them left, and what was left were just bloody piles of body parts. And then that trucker, the one from San Francisco, the door to his semi ripped clean off, and maybe that one had been a bear. The bite marks in the metal, the cab torn to shreds like a bomb had gone off inside, it had to be a bear. And then Billy Black, poor old guy who couldn't even run away, left wide-eyed in a very, _very_ small puddle of his blood.

But it wasn't a wolf with rabies. It wasn't a bear with some weird brain virus. It wasn't a guy with a grudge or a woman with a god complex or a traveling serial killer.

It was my eight-year-old sister.

* * *

Ten things about the night Alice disappeared.

 **One**

The guy from Seattle had been watching your house for days. He parked his car deep in the woods and hiked back and forth every morning to watch your dad leave for work, and then your mom, and then two little girls walk down the driveway to catch the bus for school. Sometimes, he thought about tying all four of you up and burning the house down. Sometimes he wanted to convince you that he was a long-lost family member and get integrated into your happy little circle. Sometimes, after you'd left, he slept in your beds. He ate your food. He used your shampoo and spent the week smelling like strawberries.

 **Two**

He knew your dad from a past life. Once upon a time, when Dad was a rookie, he pulled over a guy for speeding. That simple ticket lead to a search of the car, which lead to a search of a house, which lead to a fifteen year conviction for drug distribution and child pornography. Meth in the bathtub and naked boys on the computer. He appealed his conviction four times and lost all of them. Hoped to get out early on good behavior, but he wasn't that well-behaved.

Fifteen years is a long time to nurse a grudge.

 **Three**

He knew about your sleepwalking.

How could he not?

 **Four**

He found the screwdriver in the trunk of the car he'd hot-wired and stolen from a parking lot in Seattle, tires burning all the way out of town. He jammed it into our lock and busted it clean off the door.

 **Five**

He killed Rose because she woke up when he broke the lock on the front door, and she started to scream. It took less than a minute to choke the life out of her, mostly because he nearly broke her neck.

 **Six**

He took Alice because she looked like his sister. Dark hair. Blue eyes. The upturn at the end of her nose. What he had planned for her, however, was decidedly unsister-like.

 **Seven**

He had no idea you were asleep in the kitchen. If he had, you'd probably be dead too.

 **Eight**

Halfway back to his car, Alice woke up. Slung upside down over the shoulder of a stranger and bouncing through the dark, she started to struggle. Started to kick and punch and flail. She started to scream.

 **Nine**

Out of desperation, the guy dropped a screaming Alice to the ground, fumbled through the dirt, and wrapped his fingers around a rock.

 **Ten**

The blood that Edward smelled when he stumbled across the scene in the clearing was from Alice's head wound. The pure, clean blood that sparked his frenzied lust was hers. The blood that broke his fast was the man's, but the blood that quenched his thirst was hers.

Sweet little Alice, with her soft pure insides like rain and sunshine, brought out the monster in Edward Cullen.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **This story was something entirely different when I sat down to write it.**

 **You know how an author will tell you that the characters just up and ran away with the plot, and all they could do was follow?**

 **This.**

 **This is me, following them.**

 **Hadley has been the kind of enormous help that I could never adequately express to you.**

 **If I were paying her in money, she'd be worth millions - but I'm poor so I pay her in love and cookies.**


	23. Chapter 23

"So, you like that Edward guy, huh?"

I choke on my spaghetti. You'd think it was the only thing either of us knew how to cook, or that we really, really loved marinara, but we don't, and there's lots of other meals both of us are pretty good at cooking. This one, though, this one is just easy and simple, and there's a comfort about it that neither of us could explain. So we stick with it.

"I, uh -" I sputter.

"Don't even try lying to me." Dad grins. "You know shit-all about cars. Tell him that, next time, he's gonna need a better excuse to get you away from the house."

"We really _did_ go look at a car." At least that part is the truth.

"You know, I checked up on the old Cullen house." Dad eyes the meatball on the end of his fork. "That place is a downright shit hole."

I nod. It is.

"He's out there by himself, huh? All alone?" Dad is fishing again, _cop_ fishing, which isn't much different from regular fishing, but I can't tell him about Alice. I just can't. He deserves to know, but I can't ruin him like that. For one, he'd never believe me. Two, if he found out it was his sweet little baby girl who killed all those people, Alice, the culprit behind all of his unsolved murders, it would wreck him. Devastate him, maybe even more than her disappearance. Plus, I'm still not entirely convinced her current situation is better than her just being gone with no explanation. Was an eternity as a creature of the night better than being dead?

Maybe.

But maybe not.

"He registered for school yet?" Dad shoves some more spaghetti down, and I try not to let mine come back up. Of course he thought Edward was in high school. That smooth skin and the hair and the jaw, he was a hundred-year-old vampire who didn't look a day over prom, pep rallies, and locker combinations.

"He has a GED," I hedge, nervous and mutilating my meal with my fork.

"Smart kid. Why don't you do that?"

I glare across the table at him. "I've asked you. You said no."

"Really?" Dad's eyebrows furrow, and he squints at me like he's trying to remember that conversation. "When?"

"Two years ago. When I was desperate not to go back to school because this whole town treats me like a leper. _Remember_?"

I can't help it that my words come out harsh and mean and full of venom, but _fuck_. I cried at this same stupid table for days telling him how bad it was. I didn't talk to him for two whole weeks after he refused to let me homeschool, and it was the longest two weeks of my life. I hated not speaking to him, but he just didn't get it. He didn't hear the whispers or see the ugly shit scrawled on my locker in permanent marker. Didn't understand that the teachers all looked at me with an equal mixture of pity and disgust, or that the students all avoided me like I carried some highly contagious disease. He didn't know that I spent lunch time in one restroom stall or another, or that I was failing PE because I stopped going. The locker room was worse than prison, and twice, I'd been pretty sure the cheerleaders were going to drown me in a toilet before they let me up for air.

"Well, maybe this year you pull out." He shrugs like this is no big deal. "Bust through the coursework. Thought about college yet?"

I just stare at him. Here he is making conversation about post-high school education like everything is normal, like everything is the same, like I have all the time in the world to daydream about college. All I can think about is little vampire Alice three miles away from us, probably munching on bunnies and planning her wedding to Edward.

"No," I grumble.

* * *

I'm hoofing it to Edward's place when the yelp of a police siren has me flattened up against a tree trunk, my heart up in my throat. Newton slows to a crawl beside me, the white cruiser dingy from the wet asphalt roads, his window scrolling down between us. He doesn't take off his sunglasses, and he doesn't stop chewing a big fat wad of gum, and my stomach doesn't give up the disgusted roll it always does whenever I see him.

"Got a call about a suspicious death out on Lexington." He smacks his gum between his teeth. "Want to come?"

"Why?" I scrunch my nose up and stay put.

"Well, I don't know, kid," he huffs. "You're always snooping around; I thought you'd want to tag along." Newton throws the car in gear and looks dead ahead like I'm not even there. "Either way, you've got three seconds to decide."

I'm planted ass to leather in the front seat of his cruiser before the tires even start to roll.

The whole car smells like cigarettes - a hot, stale, rotten smell like a chemical truck upended on a highway somewhere, and the hot sun on the hot asphalt cooked the shit out of the whole mess of toxic waste. And then Newton rolled around in it.

I lower my window four inches.

"Your dad ok, kid?"

"Quit calling me that," I snap, arms across my chest before I even have time to think about it. I lean into the wind rushing into the cab, forehead to the glass. "I'm not a kid."

"Yeah, you are." Newton nods like he's the end-all and be-all on these kinds of things. "Your dad though, he ok?" he repeats.

"I guess," I grumble, looking out the window at the green blur of the world flying by. "Depends on what you think 'ok' means."

"He's been weird lately. Seems lost, kinda."

"You do remember, right?" My voice sounds like the bad end of an atomic explosion, acerbic and burning. "What happened to us?"

"Of course, Bella. Who could forget?" He turns a little too hard off the highway, and the rest of my body smashes up against the door. "But he's been different lately. Quiet, grouchy. I'm just wondering if everything is ok at home?"

"Why are you so interested?"

"I don't know. I care about the guy, you know? He's been better to me than my old man ever was. He's like a father-"

"Don't!" I cut him off. "He's my father, not yours."

We grind to a stop at the side of the road, and I realize that we made it clear out to east side of town in the time it took to have that awkward mess of a conversation. I glance over Newton's shoulder at the little blue house tucked between two towering trees, a mess of wildflowers spilling around the front steps, and an even bigger mess of uniformed personnel crawling all over the yard.

There's a woman sprawled in the grass.

She's in a yellow dress, face down. Her legs are akimbo, and one arm is at such an unnatural angle that it can only have come out of the socket. Her neck is torn open. Her skin is blotchy, blue and purple. Her dark hair is matted in the back. Her feet are bare. I wonder if she suffered or struggled or screamed. I wonder if she was dragged outside or ran out here on her own. I wonder if, when they pick her up, she'll leave a body-shaped hollow in the grass.

I wonder if the ground beneath her face smells like her last breath.

I wonder if this was Alice, too.

Newton swaggers over to a short, mustached guy who I think is either called Sanchez or Hernandez, but I can't remember which. He joined the force three years ago, and I followed him for four days before I decided he probably didn't murder Alice. He had a penchant for My Little Ponies and life-sized furry fetish costumes, and if that's the worst he could be, then he probably wasn't all that into murdering little girls.

I stand at the edge of the grass, six feet away from the dead woman, which is too far to see the bit of her face that's peeking out from underneath her hair, but not far enough that I can't smell the faint traces of blood and guts and rot. She has to be at least twelve hours old, a fact which I fist pump myself for knowing when I hear Hernandez/Sanchez confirm it to Newton.

"Ten hours, give or take," he says in that no-nonsense cop talk I hate more than just about anything else. No feeling. No emotion. Like they were talking about a car engine. "Found by the neighbors thirty minutes ago. Throat gouged up real bad. The living room is a mess, most of the struggle happened in there, but there's no sign of forced entry. Door was unlocked, nothing broken in."

"Forensics?" Newton asks.

"On their way, but you know Webber. He couldn't be on time even if he tried."

Both men scoff and continue to stare at the woman laid out before them. There's a rookie poking around her feet with a pair of tweezers, and a mid-level brushing the door handle for two lone female officers are deep in conversation on the far side of the yard, both looking shaken, and a whole mess of uniforms are combing the perimeter of the yard, peering under bushes and kicking aside piles of leaves.

"Just seems odd, you know," Newton mumbles, eyes glued. "It's like that old man out on the Rez a few weeks back."

"This? Nah." Hernandez/Sanchez shakes his head and folds his arms the other way, shifting his weight.

"Then why's her neck all torn up like that, huh? That's no swift cut; that's a damn hack job."

"Old man died less brutal than this. Just some blood and some bloat."

"Ain't much of a struggle to take out an old man in a chair. Healthy lady, though? She put up a fight." Newton is staring at the mangled neck of the dead woman. "There's that new guy, came to town a couple of years back. Young kid. Lives out at the old Cullen place."

He's getting way too close for comfort.

"This wasn't Edward."

The words are out of my mouth before I can even stop them. Both Newton and Hernandez/Sanchez turn to look at me, Newton with his jerked-up eyebrow and Hernandez/Sanchez with his scowl, and _oh shit_.

I should not have said that.

"Edward who?" Hernandez/Sanchez asks. He doesn't even seem fazed that his boss's kid is standing there, a teenager at a crime scene. In fact, I think it's the first time he's noticed me, ever.

"Edward Cullen." I look down at my sneakers and kick at the dirt and mumble between my teeth. "He didn't do this."

"And how, exactly, do you know that?" Newton's raised eyebrows are now slouched down low over his nose, his jaw tight, and he's scowling at me. I'm probably going to have to find my own ride home. I straighten up, stick out my chin, and meet him right in the eyes.

"Because I was with him last night."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **The next chapter is my favorite one.** **I literally squealed when I wrote it.**

 **As ever, Hadley is a gift that I'm a stupid-lucky to be on the receiving end of. What I did to deserve her, I still haven't figured out.**

 **Thank you for reading!**

 **HBM**


	24. Chapter 24

Edward won't stop smiling at me. It's weird. Usually he looks tired and sick and as worn through as my oldest shirt, the one with the holes in the elbows and the hem all frayed. But tonight, he's smiling.

"What's up with your face?"

"My face?" He brings a hand to his cheek, like he's checking for stray blood the same way someone thinks they might have traces of their dinner left on their chin.

"You're all smiles tonight. It's weird."

"Weird?"

"Yeah. Really weird."

"You stood up for me today." The smile just gets bigger, and if I didn't know he was a hundred- year-old vampire, I'd think he was just another teen boy with a crush. On _me_. I blush hard enough to break out in a heat rash.

"You were spying on me?"

"I was keeping an eye on you." His smile falters a bit. "Newton is bad news; you shouldn't have gotten in that car."

"Was it Alice? The woman in the grass? Was it Alice who did it?" I glance off toward the highway, my mind zooming down the asphalt until I was standing back in front of that cute little house with the flowers and the porch and the dead woman in the lawn. I knew they'd taken her away, carted her off to the morgue, but in my mind, she will always be there, sprawled in the grass like a broken doll.

Edward's smile slips completely, and he glances away with a heavy sigh. "Yes."

"I thought she was getting better."

"I never said that."

"She got away," I ask without actually asking.

"She's tricky like that. It's easy to lose her."

"Yeah, no shit. I know the feeling."

"It's your fault, in a way. The fact that she got away."

"Mine?" I glare at him because keeping an eye on Alice has nothing to do with me these days. Even if I could be the one to watch over her, there's no way I could stop her if she decided to off someone. Or me.

"Yes. You've been such a distraction lately. I had to get away. Clear my head. You smell so strong that I had to run clear to Calgary to do that. She took advantage of my absence."

"You ran to Calgary?" That was a decent seven hundred miles away. "I stink that bad?"

"I never said you stink," he chuckles. "In fact, you smell so good, there are times I have to keep myself from leaping on you."

"Leaping on me, and then what?" I'm basically suspicious of everything now, and when a vampire tells you you smell good and he wants to leap on you, there's a high probability you wouldn't come out of that situation alive.

Edward leans in, too fast and too slow, not in human time at all. Just a blur and then a halt that happens before I can blink, and he's holding me just half an inch off his lips. Just holding me, not breathing and not blinking and not moving any further, and _god_ , he frustrates the hell out of me.

"Kiss you," he exhales. "Leap on you and kiss the shit out of you."

Holy.

 _Fuck_.

"Do it then," I whisper. "I bet I taste delicious."

"I'm certain of it." His voice is a waiver. An exhale. A falter. Then he gives in.

This time, it's not my forehead.

He tastes like the best kind of wrong. Like a fatal sting of poison. Like the final sinful act that gets you permanently kicked out of church, or school, or heaven. He tastes like butterscotch and burnt sugar and the wrong end of a lit match.

The flame end.

We could kiss forever. For days. For hours. I never want to stop, never want him to stop, but he does. It's not because of me. It's not him or that maybe it's wrong, or that maybe it's so right it hurts. He pulls away because there's a scream that rips through the still, heavy air around us like a hot knife through cold butter.

Alice.

Her little stone fingers wrap around my wrist and clamp down so hard that I feel the bones grate together before they crumble under the pressure, and I'm just about to cry out in splintered pain when her teeth find purchase. Deep in my shoulder, clear down through the muscle and the cartilage to the joint and everything goes numb and warm and lovely. She bites again, higher this time, and the numb just gets number, and the warm just gets warmer, and then she bites me again. So close to my neck. Again. So close to the end. She's moaning like I taste even better than she imagined, better than any bunny ever could, and the numb is just pure bliss for two solid seconds before she's being ripped away.

Her teeth leave ragged gashes across my shoulder blade, and her fingernails scrape five long trenches down the length of my arm.

Edward is right next to me, panting, his hands in fists and shoulders hunched as Alice lands in the grass an entire football field away from us. She's on her feet immediately and racing back like a speeding bullet as the blood starts to well up and drip down my arm, splattering my shoes. Edward's hand slams into Alice, square in her chest, stopping her cold not two feet away from me. Her eyes are clouded, and her mouth is in a snarl, and her hands are reaching for me, but she looks up with Edward with something like clarity in her eyes.

"Go," he growls, his hand still planted firm on her chest.

Alice blinks, the blood lust ebbing as her eyes clear, and her mouth slackens.

"W-what?" she stutters, eyes gone wide, hands dropping to her sides.

"Go." His voice is grit and grime. Anger and impatience and exhaustion. He sounds resigned, like the project he's been working on for years is now a failure, and he's finally throwing in the towel. Giving up. Calling it quits. Except the towel is my sister, and the project is her endless undead livelihood, and I think I look just as shocked as she does.

"You don't mean that," she whispers.

"I do. I can't help you anymore. I've tried, Alice. You have to go."

With one last look at me, Alice snarls, her eyes narrowed and her mouth full of poison, literal and figurative. "I hate you," she hisses, and then she's gone, the trees quivering and the fog boiling in her wake. Edward watches her go, eyes on the spot she disappeared into for a long, long time before he turns toward me. His gaze finds my face, my shoulder, my elbow, my fingers, and then the puddle of blood at my feet.

"Does it hurt?" he asks, gazing at the blood splashing my sneakers, his hands reaching out toward me. That numb feeling starts to ebb away, replaced by a pain that I can't even begin to describe. A burn of ten thousand supernovas, of ten thousand acres of forest fire, of ten thousand eyes of god. All of it in my shoulder.

I wrench away, moaning as I shuffle backward.

"Not as much as when you fucking _lied_ to me," I hiss, tears stinging my eyes for the first time in three years. I can't cry over Alice, but I can cry over Edward.

If that doesn't say something really fucked up about me, I don't know what does.

"I didn't want to, Bella, but what choice did I have?"

"Three years. Three _years_ , Edward! That's over a thousand days. I know that probably means nothing to you by now, but that's a thousand _days_ , and I suffered for every single one of those." My voice cracks at the end because even as I say it, I can barely believe it. I can barely believe how long Alice has been gone, how long I've been living in this suspended hell, how long I've been treading water while the answer was sitting in some abandoned house not three miles away.

"You think I haven't suffered?" Edward's face is tight in the middle, eyebrows pulled in and his mouth in a thin, hard line. He's looking at me like I have no idea what suffering is. Like my weak human mind couldn't possibly comprehend his kind of pain. Maybe I can't, but he's partially responsible for my version of this suffering thing, and I hate him for it. I hate him for making me want him. I hate him for making me think about him, and for making me think he was helping me. I hate him for keeping Alice away but also for knowing that it was the best thing to do.

I hate him, and I don't hate him, and that makes me hate him even more.

"You _made_ me suffer," I gasp, the fire in my shoulder starting to spread. "You kept me from the truth, you kept _her_ , and now look at me. Look at her." I whip my good arm toward the silent forest where Alice disappeared. "What am I supposed to do with my life now? Just go on like this didn't happen? Like she's not out there somewhere eating animals, or god forbid, people? Am I just supposed to forget about her, about you? Go back to school like I'm not completely different from the person I was last month?"

He doesn't answer. Instead, his gaze slides slow and steady down my arm, down my fingers, down to my feet where the grass is drowning in a thick coating of my bright red blood. I watch his eyes go from gold to black in a split second. His skin shifts paler than ever, and he takes a mindless step toward me.

"Edward," I say, but he doesn't respond. He just takes another step.

"Edward, stop."

Another step.

A tongue across his lips.

A twitch in his fingers.

"Stop," I say, just a whisper.

"Bella, I‒" He licks his lips again and takes another step. Just one more and he'll be right up on me with his chest to mine and his hips to mine and his mouth probably on my neck, and what the fuck is happening right now?

"Stop!" I scream, right in his face, and even that doesn't snap him out of it. "Edward!"

My voice cracks and splits in my throat, and it's painful, but it's nothing compared to the venom in my arm or the break in my heart or Edward's teeth buried in my neck.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Eeep!**

 ***runs to Hadley's arms***


	25. Chapter 25

"You bit me."

Edward is seated beside the bed, elbows on his knees, gaze between his feet and furrow in his brow, looking guilty enough to have just murdered a schoolhouse of children. Remorseful and angry with himself. I feel like I've been asleep for an achy million years, a thousand painful decades, and I miss him so bad it's all I can do not to fling myself into his arms.

Still, the first thing out of my mouth is an accusation.

Edward looks sheepish and glances away, mumbling under his breath. "Yeah. In a way."

"What the hell is _that_ supposed to mean? In a way?" My ears are ringing because every single bumblebee and double decker airplane and falling star that has ever existed in the history of time are all flying by at this very moment. My vision is warping so far I can see dust floating in a courtyard in Paris. My hands feel as hot as the seventh circle of hell. I'm freezing and dizzy, and I'm pretty sure my lungs are carved out of stone. They're not working at all.

This must be what shock feels like.

"I didn't just bite you."

"Sure feels like you did." I put a hand to my neck, and even though it's not raw or open or even bleeding, it's still painful in a strangely numb way. It's cold and suspiciously still, no thump below the skin, no swish beneath the surface. I smash my fingers against place where I should have a hole at least the size of that blood-red mouth of his, where I should feel warm and sticky.

Where I should have a pulse.

"You would have died anyway, regardless of what I did."

"I _died_?" I screech.

"Not exactly," he mutters glumly.

"I _died_ ," I say again, my voice sounding oddly monotone. I can't pry my fingers away from my neck, and I can't get air into my lungs. I feel dizzy-sick, like I just stepped off a roller coaster I wasn't strapped into tightly enough.

"No, you didn't." Edward is shaking his head, but he's still not looking directly at me.

"But I'm not alive. I have no pulse," I wheeze.

"True. But this isn't death."

"You're sugarcoating something."

"Yes." He nods deliberately.

"For me? Or for you?" I ask. I still feel sick. Still feel like I could burst out of my skin or suddenly shrink down too small to see with the bare eye. I still feel like the sun is too strong and the moon is too far away and like the ground is softer than it had ever been before.

"For us both. Though, probably more for myself. I gave you the worst gift I could have ever given you." His eyes fall to my mouth, and the tip of his tongue finds the tip of his fang. He pokes at it thoughtfully at it as he stares off at the trees.

 _Oh_.

It's not shock, this thing that I'm feeling. It's not the creep of death or the panicked struggle to live.

It's being a vampire.

"Fuck!" I scream. " _Edward_!" I'm on my feet before I even think of doing it, trembling and seasick on hard, dry land. "You turned me into a vampire!"

"Yes. I'm sorry."

"Fuck you!" My voice rips through my throat in a way that's almost painful.

"Well, fuck you too!" He yells back, and that nasty word sounds so wrong in his prim and proper mouth, even he seems to recoil at the sound. He closes his eyes and lets out a ragged growl before he's right up in my face. Finger to my chest. Nose brushing the very tip of my own. Eyes blazing like a million fires of the molten lava hell just below my feet.

"Fuck you too, Bella," he hisses. "What was that shit? _Kiss me; I taste delicious_?" He spits another curse word, and I'm half-stuck on how sexy he sounds when he's mad before I realize he's mad at _me_. "That kiss had you—I had you all up in my head. Your scent. Your taste. And then, Alice… and you were bleeding and… I mean…" He pauses and seems to deflate, shoulders slumping and his chin landing on his chest. "What was supposed to happen there?"

"You weren't supposed to _bite_ me."

"What was I supposed to do, then?"

"Kiss me. Like a normal, boring kiss."

"Kissing should never be boring," he grumbles.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Sorry about that cliffhanger, and the long wait.**

 **I went on vacation *gasp* and was out of internet access.**

 **Hadley is my favorite person, not only because she separates my run-on-sentnces, but she also lets me rant on the phone for hours so I don't send questionable PMs.**

 **Thank you for reading!**

 **xo**

 **HBM**


	26. Chapter 26

2:30 a.m. doesn't feel like the middle of the night anymore.

I can feel the sun on the opposite side of the earth, the faint burn of daylight in China, the sunrise over the wasteland deserts of Russia. I can feel the cool creep of night settling over New York City. I can smell someone's armpits, four miles away. I can taste stale cigarettes and dried-up beer and the rancid food forgotten in the back of someone's refrigerator. I can smell motor oil and antifreeze and salt off the highways. I can smell the stink of the high school locker rooms and the molded damp stench of the library and the bleach they use to clean the floor at the police station.

The reek of the garbage dump on the far side of town? Unbearable.

The smoke from the logging mills way out by the county line? Suffocating.

I'm on the porch, tasting the air, when Edward reappears.

He comes through the trees at the far end of the clearing, dragging a body of something large and hairy and antlered. I can't even swallow the thought of it, even as my stomach is gnawing into itself but I'm so hungry I could drain that thing, drain a couple of those things, maybe even twenty of them, and then I'm there with my fingers to fur and my nose to hide and my mouth latched onto a warm, wet hole in the side of an elk.

I come up with a gasp.

"Whoa. Hungry?" Edward is standing a few feet away, hands in his pockets, grin on his face like he just watched a monkey in a vest do an amusing trick, instead of some girl going to town on the local wildlife.

"Yes. Don't laugh at me." I stand, feeling suddenly unsteady, the slosh of blood in my stomach louder than the roar of the ocean. I wipe my face, certain I'm just making it worse, wishing I was smoother or cuter or at least better at covering all my awkwardness up with a cool new vampire veneer. Instead, I'm faster and stronger and sleeker but somehow just as odd as I've ever been.

"I'm not laughing. I just did the same thing to three of those." He waves his hand absently at the elk, now looking a little more limp than it was at first sight. Of course there's not a drop of blood on him.

Asshole.

"Your appetite will start to increase, the older you get. It will take more and more to sustain you."

"I thought I wouldn't age?" I kick at the side of the elk, now cool and starting to harden. I can't help but think about all the dead body research I did for Alice and how it was just natural, the shift from soft and warm to hard and cold.

"Not technically. But you'll still find yourself marking the time that passes." Edward's voice drops at the end, as though the thought alone is sad enough.

"How old are you, then?"

"Too old for you," he laughs. "If you knew, you'd think I was disgusting."

 _Probably not._ I shake my head. "You don't look a day over seventeen."

"Illusion. And good genes."

* * *

Edward needs to run off some steam. At least that's how he puts it. I think maybe he needs some time alone but doesn't know how to tell me. He's looked even more drawn and pensive ever since the whole Alice fiasco. Worried and tortured ever since the whole biting me thing went down. He tells me he'll be back in two hours, and I wonder how far he can run in that time. Probably clear up to Alaska and back.

When he's gone, I look for Alice's room.

I know it's close by. I can smell it, the timid taste of her in the air. She lived with him for three years, and it smells like violets. Brown sugar. Baby angel tears with a healthy dose of demonic possession. It's so strong, I'm either hallucinating the faint purple cloud wafting down the long dark hallway, or it's actually there; I'm not sure which option to be more intrigued by.

I try every door, but only the one at the far end of the hall straight across from Edward's own bedroom isn't. I open that door to the set of a horror movie.

In this dank old house, all molded grey and shadowed black, there is a room of little girl carnage.

Like Alice's room at home but so much worse.

The wallpaper is still pink, despite sun-faded age, printed with gold foil filigree and velveteen flowers, all mauve and rose and pastel peach. There's lace draped over the windows and canopying the bed and shading the lamps, all of it brittle and yellowing. There's a musty white bedspread and a rag rug sewn with roses. There's a pale pink vanity, with tarnished handles and a webbed mirror, spider-veined by a fist or old age. A trio of creepy plastic dolls sits slumped on the window seat with tangled hair, empty eyes, and frozen smiles.

Everything is covered in a fine layer of dust. I shuffle into the room, a feeling of dread rising in my throat. Alice's stuffed leopard, the one that is more grey than pink, is lying abandoned on the bed. It's smiling, despite the fact that it's been left behind, and I wonder if she even cared that I brought it to her. I pick up the leopard, hold it close as I examine the top of the dresser nearby, littered with hair trinkets and a creaky old jewelry box that doesn't play music anymore. A hair brush with long blonde hair wrapped up in it and a brittle bouquet of cornflowers so old, they disintegrate when I touch them.

The closet is full of clothing. Dresses. High necks and long sleeves and knee-length hemlines. Sashes and pinafores and petticoats. Horizontal lace and vertical chambray and built-in whalebone. All of them child-sized.

This isn't just Alice's room.

Nothing here is new enough to belong only to her.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Two-for-one today, because I left you hanging for a week.**

 **All my thank you's and love to Hadley Hemingway.**

 **She is the prettiest flower in my meadow and I am that annoying bumblebee that keeps trying to eat her.**

 **Thank you for reading along.**

 **xo**

 **HBM**


	27. Chapter 27

"I have to go see Charlie."

Edward is shaking his head before I even finish my statement.

"No, Bella."

"I can't just leave him hanging."

"He's a tough guy. He'll get over it."

This time, I'm shaking my head before he finishes. "He's already lost Alice. He's basically lost me, but he doesn't even know it yet. He's all alone. I have to tell him."

"Tell him _what_ , exactly?" Edward's eyebrow is raised, his voice pure skepticism, and he's looking at me like I have zero clue as to what I'm talking about. But I've thought this through, all night long. When nighttime lasts a million years, that's a lot of time to think it over. A whole lot of time to feel bad, then worse, then plan a million plans before I finally realize the one and only way to throw that man off my trail forever.

I'm going to go home and flip out.

Teenage girl style.

I'm going to scream and cry and blame school and boys and teachers. I'm going to throw some stuff around and kick something, and I'm going to tell him that I'm leaving. Right now. Tonight. This instant. I can't take this town. I can't take this life. I can't take any of it anymore, and I'm leaving. And then, the kicker: I'm going to go live with Mom. I'd rather live in her yurt in some field with the naked neighbors and the quinoa and the bearded guy who thought he was the second coming of Jesus. I'd rather be there with her than here with him. I'm going to fly up the stairs in tears and pack a bag and then push by all of his pleading and his excuses and his promises to make it better. I'm going to get into my truck and gun the engine and leave him heartbroken forever.

I'm going to devastate him.

Maybe, if I do it well enough, he won't come looking for me. He's a hard guy to lose, just ask the dead guy he's been tracking through Seattle for the last three years, still searching for the fading traces despite the fact that he will never, ever find the man. He's persistent in the worst kind of way, the little flame of hope that never fully dies out, always burning deep and strong despite every indication that it should have gone out. Three years in and he was still looking for Alice, still looking for answers, still on the hunt for a trail that went cold long before he even got that phone call from me.

I have to ruin myself to him, otherwise he'll never give up on me the way he's never given up on them.

The house is dark. No lights, even though the cruiser is parked out front, and it's only seven o'clock. The sun has just set, and it's not like he sleeps easy, not like he'd be in bed this early. A small part of me starts to worry he's resurrected that yearly alcohol addiction of his again, and he's finally managed to kill himself, lounging on the bottom of an entire bottle of whiskey.

I walk up the stairs, trying to move slower than I should, trying not to stand so straight or look so alert, trying to look like the old me rather than this new version because if there's anyone in the world who will spot the difference, it'll be him. He'll take one look at me and know something wasn't right, so I slouch. I drag my feet. I pull my mouth down and rumple my hair and reach for the doorknob at what seems to be a snail's pace. The door creaks, and I call out his name.

For the second time in my life, I come home to a horror show.

My father, my dad, the guy who changed my diapers and taught me how to ride a bike and cooked me nothing but spaghetti for the last three years, is face down in a ravaged puddle of blood. His eyes are open, and his mouth is gaping, and the wound on his neck still pumping warm and wet into the carpet. He's still blinking. Still breathing out of the hole in his neck, and his eyes are on me. I can taste his fear. His sadness. His soul, as it escapes him. I can taste the last metallic remnants of his heartbeat and the remorse ripping through every last dying cell in his body. He gurgles, something unsaid caught in his mouth, and I'm on my knees in his blood, my hand on his cheek as his eyes slip closed.

"No," I whisper.

This is a dream. This is a nightmare. This is a movie or a book or a play about someone else's life, someone else's really shitty life. This isn't my life; it can't be.

This isn't real. This isn't happening.

A sound breaks the silence, roars through the echo of death like a freight train through a tunnel. A sob that I think might be from me, except I can't get a breath. I can't catch my heartbeat. I can't feel my hands or my face or my brain. I want to react, want to scream or cry or rage around the house until it's just flattened, but I can't. And yet, there's someone sobbing, and even though I leave my hand on his face, still warm and soft, my eyes pull up toward the sound.

Alice.

Standing at the top of the stairs. She's staring down at us, still in that nightgown, now wet and sticking to her skin, stained pink and rose and red. Her arms are splattered, and her hair is damp, and her face is smeared with blood. Her fangs are out full force, and her eyes are red, and her mouth is twisted up in a smirk as though she thinks this is funny.

"Alice. No."

"I couldn't stop."

"You killed him."

"So what?" Alice bellows from the top of the stairs, loud enough to rattle the picture frames on the walls, and I cover my ears, the high pitch of her scream nearly breaking my ear drums.

When I pull my hands away and glance back up at the stairs, she's gone. I don't know how much time I spend sitting there in a puddle of my dad's blood. I don't know how long I hold his hand, wishing he'd twitch or blink or groan. I don't know how long I wallow in the second bloodbath this house has seen in less than five years, but Edward shows up just after the sun sets, which means I've been here for hours. My knees are stiff, and my feet are numb, and my heart aches like something run over by a semi, several times. My eyes are sore, and my mouth is dry, and my fingers are tingly, and when Edward pulls me to my feet, I collapse against him and cry all over over again.

He helps me put the place back together.

I can't leave it a disaster. Our lives were a disaster, and I just can't let it all end that way. We deserved better. He deserved better. The last moments between them, the struggle at the end, it must have been terrible. The curtains are ripped away from the windows, and the couch is overturned. The television is screen down on the carpet, and the front door is off its hinges.

His beer is freshly opened, the carbonation still bubbling, next to his chair.

Edward rights the furniture while I mop the floors. He fixes the front door while I do the last of the dishes. He vacuums the living room while I wipe the fine layer of dust from all the shiny surfaces in the house, the windowsills and the stove and the coffee table. We haul my dad out to the backyard and lay him in the grass by the woodshed, right there at the edge of the forest. With that hole ripped in his neck, the only plausible answer is an animal attack—the same magical, maniacal creature he's been chasing for years, the one taking down hikers and truckers and kids walking home from school.

He spent my whole life being big, but now, he just looks limp and flat and empty, staring up at the sky.

"I can't believe this is my life now," I mutter, staring down at him in the dewdrop grass. "I didn't even get to tell him goodbye."

Edward doesn't say anything. He's staring off into the tree, his eyes narrowed and his jaw tight, and his whole body leaning forward just the tiniest bit, like he's prepared to pounce.

"What? What do you hear?" I ask.

Edward sighs, deep and heavy, and slumps at the shoulders. "Nothing," he says, looking back at me. His eyes have fallen, and the tensed stance is gone.

"What were you listening for?" I try hard, strain myself, but the world is just wind and water and atoms bouncing against each other. Just trucks on highways and waves on rocks and sunlight on sand.

"Alice. I keep thinking I hear her, but…"

"Why?" I can't help but gasp, feeling breathless even though I haven't even taken a breath in hours. "Why would you even do that?"

As far as I'm concerned, Alice can fuck right off. She's not Alice anymore. She's a little monster, a demon in miniature, who just murdered my father after a three year rampage, taking out innocent people like they were just candy, and she was sugar-starved. I don't even know for certain how many she's killed but this, _him_ , lying here at my feet… this is too far.

There's no coming back from this.

There's no forgiveness left in me.

Edward looks hard at me, his face angry. "It's my fault she's out there."

"It's _her_ fault, actually." I know I sound like a petulant kid, but _shit_. Look around, dude. Pull your head out of your ass for three solid seconds and get some perspective.

"This is my punishment," he says, "I deserve this."

"You are oddly self-effacing at the weirdest times. I don't understand what you're saying at all."

Edward groans heavily and clenches his fists. His voice is tense and tight, his words wobbly and uncertain. "This is happening to me again because of my sister."

"You have a sister?" My mind skitters all the way back to the old haunted house and that room full of little girl clothing and dolls and blonde hair and something in my brain just clicks together.

" _Had_ ," he says sharply. "Had."

"What happened to her?" I wonder if she looked like him. Wonder if she sounded like him or if she hooked her ankles together every time she sat, just like he did. I wonder if her laugh sounded like his or if she was as sad as he seemed to be all the time. If she had that wild hair and tight mouth. Edward just shakes his head at me, eyes pinched like he can hear all the questions tumbling between my ears. He doesn't say anything.

"I'd probably understand, you know. I lost my sister, too," I grumble.

Edward moves so quickly that I startle. He's by my side so fast I gasp, and he grabs me by the arm so tight that my eyes well up water. His eyes go pitch black night, and his face twists into something rock solid and eight million years old.

"You couldn't even _begin_ to understand," he hisses in my face before he flings me away and runs headlong into the trees.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hadley Hemingway is my forever-love, star-girl, soul-shine, soft-cloud rockstar.**

 **She also tells me when I haven't finished a sentence, or I let one run along for an entire paragraph.**

 **Thank you for reading.**

 **xo**

 **HBM**


	28. Chapter 28

There's this old bridge fifty-two miles out of town. It used to connect a logging camp to the highway, but two workers died there in less than a month, and the Feds shut the whole operation down nearly ten years ago. Now it's just a bridge to nowhere. Old trestle style, the metal is rusted, and the wood is rotten, and the river below is so far away that it's hidden by the fog. There's wind and birds and the far off sound of water, but it's so isolated from any kind of humanity that it's blissfully quiet.

No cars. No voices. No heartbeats.

I'm there for nearly two days before Edward decides to bother me.

"Are you ever coming home?" He's standing in the fog just a few feet away, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on his shoes like he fully expects me to say no.

I roll my eyes at him and dig my fingers into the soft rotten wood beneath my legs. A week ago, I would have gotten a handful of splinters. Now, I can't feel anything but my brain.

"What's supposed to happen to me now? What am I supposed to do with myself?" I ask.

"You just… live, I suppose."

" _Live_ ," I huff. What a fucking word. "What would happen to me if I jumped?"

"You'd land in the water, probably." Edward looks over the edge.

"Would I die?"

"No." He shakes his head with a certain sort of conviction, and my cement heart drops right down into my stone stomach.

"I'm a fuckng vampire," I say. I'm not looking for an answer or a justification or even any sympathy. It's just a statement. A fact. A sad reality, because my hair will never get any longer, and I'll never be any taller than this. I'll never crave another hamburger, and I'll never want to eat another peanut butter sandwich, and I'm never going to need to shower if I don't want to.

At least I'm never going to sleepwalk again.

"Yes. You're also very upset with me."

"Are you going to tell me?" I ask. "What happened to her—are you going to tell me?" I don't need to say it. I know he understands who I'm talking about because his pale face goes greyer than ever before, and his eyes narrow at me like I'm asking him to pull out all his fingernails.

"I killed her," he says, simple and bland, like we're talking about a houseplant.

"Like, changed her?" I ask.

"No," he says roughly. "I was too young, too unpracticed. I drained her before I knew what was happening. There was no saving her from me."

 _Oh._

"How old was she?"

"Six," he manages to choke. He reaches into that limp suit jacket and pulls out a photograph, stained and dog-eared like it's been handled too many times. She was pretty. Very pretty. Big eyes, big smile, big curls. There's a lot of Edward in her face, most of it in the way her mouth splays out wide across her face and in the bridge of her nose.

"What was her name?"

"Charlotte." He looks away, and I think if he could cry, that's exactly what he would be doing right now. "She was the accident I've never escaped from. I thought I could atone for it by saving Alice."

"That's why you took her? Alice? Charlotte is why you changed her? "

"The thought of leaving her there to die was unbearable."

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Short chapter, I know.** **That's the way these kids roll.**

 **The one person who makes sure that I continue on when I feel like giving in knows exactly who she is.**

 **Everyone else knows it, too, but I ain't quitting my praises anytime soon.**

 **That's the way it shall stay.**

 **xo**

 **HBM**


	29. Chapter 29

I corner Newton when he's the last one left, the cop shop abandoned for the night. Small town crime means they leave only one guy to man the single room jailhouse at night. The rest go home to sleep through the dark hours when humans get up to their worst of habits. Pulled out of bed by emergency calls, these cops usually show up with sleep still crusting their eyes and their heads and their dreams.

Newton is locking up, keys in the door, when I slink up like a shadow and scare the piss out of him.

"Bella." Newton flattens against the wall, all the blood draining from his face. He goes as pale as I am, his fingers pressed against the drywall like his grip might be the only thing holding him upright. "Where the fuck have you been?"

"Staying with a friend." I look off in the direction of Edward's haunted house, the smell of it strong despite the fact it's at least fifteen miles away.

"Your dad. You know about your dad, right?" He looks scared to tell me, worried he might have to break the news, and even though I feel sad, terribly, horribly sad, I can't bring myself to well up tears. I probably look like some unemotional asshole to him right now.

"Yeah," I sigh. "I was at the funeral."

"I didn't see you there."

"I couldn't deal. I stayed out of sight." That, and the fact that it just happened to be one of the three sunny days of the whole entire year. I couldn't very well show up at the graveside sparkling like a goddamn Tiffany ring, now could I? I'd never hated the sunshine so much in my entire life. I spent that entire night lying in the dirt piled on top of the casket, on top of my dad, just wishing I'd gotten there a moment sooner, an hour sooner, a day sooner, enough to save him or even just explain how everything got so fucked up.

"People have been asking about you."

"I bet," I grumble.

"They're worried."

"No, they're not," I snap. "They think it was me."

"They don't," he mutters, sounding unconvinced.

"Yes, they do. They think I murdered Alice, and now they think I murdered my dad, but you know what, Newton? I didn't kill either of them."

"That so?"

I glare at him. "Yes. I mean no. I mean… it wasn't me. Either of them."

Newton's eyes pinch at the ends, and he peers down at me in the gloom, almost reaching out to touch my arm. Almost. "You ok, kid? You don't look so good."

I glance away, sure that he's noticing my pale skin and my dark eyes and my limp hair. I talk with my lips tight so he can't spot my fangs. "I need your help."

"With what?"

"I have to clear my name." I did not intend to become the town horror story. They didn't even know the worst of it, but I sure wasn't going to let them vilify me in the history books either. I shove the keys into Newton's chest, getting a sick satisfaction out of the way he flinches. There are three rusted silver keys on a single ring. I found them after rooting around in the rotting leaves and musty, molding dirt near that shitty old car in the woods. The whole time, I laughed to myself about how I spent my last moments there wishing Edward and I could just go on a real date without me being weird and him being dead. Now I was searching for a three-years-dead dude in the muck and the mire.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

It took half an hour, but I finally found something. A limp pair of pants, nearly disintegrated with age, those keys rattling in the pocket. It was no wonder there was nothing left of that asshole, all these years later. His body had obviously been strewn around by wild animals after Edward drained him, his clothing scattered three years deep in the leaves. There might not be much to tie him to the car, to tie him to Alice, but it was better than nothing.

I left Alice's stuffed leopard on the front seat for good measure.

"Two miles north of the Depot. Straight north." I glare at Newton. "Don't go west. Don't go east. _North_."

"What am I supposed to do with these?" Newton dangles the keys between us, looking confused.

"Your fucking job. For once."

* * *

When I slump through the front door, feeling more defeated by my conversation with Newton than I probably should, Edward is not alone. He stands, rubbing his palms on his pants, looking drawn. More so than normal. I frown at him before I notice the man standing behind him.

He looks like he crawled out of a cave. His hair is long and tangled, his clothing is worn and dirty, ripped apart and patched back together a hundred times over. His shoes are scuffed and covered in mud. He has deep dark eyes and dirt around his nails and crooked yellow teeth, to say nothing of his fangs. His smile doesn't look at all like a smile, but more like the beginnings of the snarl right before the carnivore pounces on something smaller and weaker and cornered.

"Bella," Edward says, gesturing toward the stranger. "This is Laurent. He is visiting from the north."

Laurent doesn't hesitate. He steps forward and reaches for me, a hand held out in my direction. I swallow down my revulsion to shake the man's hand. I don't know what it is, precisely, but my gut does not like him. Neither does my nose.

"She is yours, Edward?" Laurent asks, eyes all over me, his tongue running the edge of his upper lip. I literally can feel him peeling my clothing off in his mind, and I wrench my hand away, resisting the urge to wipe it clean on my jeans.

"I'm no one's," I snap. Edward flinches. Barely, but he does.

"Sit, please, let's sit." Edward beckons me to the counter, and they resume their seats. I can't bring myself to settle beside them, so instead, I stand close enough that I can feel Edward against me. He has a strangely calming effect on me these days, like a sugar pill for my overbearing anxiety.

"How do you two… ?" I wave my hand between them, and Edward gives me a rueful smile, as though he doesn't want to expose me to something dirty.

"Laurent is my maker."

"He turned you?"

Laurent nods, a grin on his face as he takes a sip of whiskey. "1907, I do believe. A bar in London, rather run-down if I remember correctly. Terrible whiskey, tasted like the wrong end of a prostitute."

 _Gross_. I didn't even want to know what that meant.

"He got me drunk and drug me into the alleyway when I was too far gone to stand alone." Edward's mouth twists to the side as though he just ate something rotten. "I think it's fair to say he took advantage of me."

Laurent claps a solid hand to Edward's shoulder, grinning widely. "You were always my favorite newborn, Edward. Your hunger? It was a privilege to witness."

"Leaving me there to turn in broad daylight didn't seem very caring of you." Edward huffs into his glass, sipping his drink.

"Don't mistake my affection for cruelty."

The stifling tension is shattered by a girl entering the kitchen through the back door. She's not much older than I am, even though she looks a thousand decades deep. Her skin is smooth, pale, and pure, but her face is dirty, and her arms are smudged dark with bruises. Her clothes are just as ragged as Laurent's but without the careful patchwork, barely hanging together. Her red hair is dull and wild and matted with leaves. Her mouth is a tight line. Her shoulders are slumped underneath an invisible weight.

Her eyes are on her feet.

She stops close to Laurent and drops a heavy bundle on the floor, stepping back without looking up.

"You may wait for me outside." Laurent waves a dismissive hand in her direction, and she nods once before turning away, leaving just as silently as she appeared. I frown after her, the air around her smelling of desolation.

Laurent notices me staring after the girl. "Tanya," he tells me. "I found her in the forest outside of Warsaw."

"Found her?" I don't like the sound of that at all.

Laurent's mouth breaks into an evil smile. "Stumbled across her, shall I say? Copulating with a boy in the bushes like a common dog." He licks his lips, the memory obviously still heavy in his mouth. "The boy tasted of diesel fuel, but she was such a mouthful, I couldn't let her go."

Tanya has walked down the steps off the porch and is standing in the field behind the house with her face toward the sky. Her eyes are closed, and her mouth is pulled down at the edges, and I think that if she had any tears left in her body, she would be crying.

"You're keeping her? Against her will?" That nasty feeling in my stomach churns again, all acid and bile and disgust.

"She carries my belongings, warms my bed. I can see that it is different between you." Laurent gestures to the scant amount of space between Edward and me. "Typically, new vampires are beholden to their makers for the first decade of their new lives."

"Beholden," I say.

"Yes, she is mine. As you are his, whether you admit to it or not." Laurent glances at Edward, and I do too, but he's looking at his hands, studiously ignoring us both.

"How long until you set her free?" I ask, looking back out toward Tanya, but she has disappeared from view.

"Three years."

My mouth opens, ready to spit some vitriol about slavery and fetishism and men always being shitty, even in the afterlife, but Edward cuts me off.

"I haven't known you to venture beyond the ice fields, Laurent. What bring you so far south?" He sounds uninterested, like boring small talk is just about all he can bear right now, but I know he's just steered us clear of an all-out brawl in the kitchen.

"The demon in Seattle, have you not heard? The underground has been talking about nothing else for weeks now."

"There's a demon in Seattle?" I ask. How fitting. I always hated that place.

"She's been ambushing groups of people, decimating whole families. Thirty-six so far, and that's just the rumors. There must be more. No control, children." Laurent shakes his head as if he actually regrets the loss of human life. "Very little impulse management."

"A child?" Edward's voice hovers just above a whisper, and he's gripping my hand hard enough to make it burn. If I were still human, it would probably be shattered to smithereens in his grip.

Laurent nods. "She couldn't have been more than ten, but she fought me like a centuries-old vampire might. I still bear the marks." He lifts his sleeve to reveal a faded trio of pale purple scratches on the snow white skin of his arm. "Terrible, really. One of the harder jobs I've taken. No one likes killing children."

If I had a heart, it would have stopped beating. If I had blood, it would have ground to a halt. If I could speak, I'd be babbling incoherently. But I have none of that. Instead, I have a bone-deep, stomach twisting feeling of dread. Laurent casually kicks at the dirty cloth bundle at his feet, and as it unfurls, out flops Alice, a concrete thump on the floor at our feet.

Deader than ever before.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **There are diamonds, and then there is Hadley.**

 **Thank you for reading.**

 **xo**

 **HBM**


	30. Chapter 30

**Dear Self,**

You're actually going to die three times.

Weird, I know, but hear me out.

The first time was metaphorical, right? Your sister gets taken, your whole world gets upended, and you spend three years in some sort of suspended hell that feels like real life but reads way more like a movie script. Seriously. That is the stuff of horror movies. Of three-part miniseries dramas. Of heart ripper chick flicks, except the hot guy who swoops in to save you isn't some prince in disguise, or a heartbroken rock star, or even a nice cowboy with a nicer horse.

He is actually a vampire, and he didn't save you.

He killed you.

Which brings you to death number two. The literal one. The one where said vampire/hot dude up and bites you because he gets a hard-on for your blood and can't stop himself. The one where your eight-year-old sister uses you as an appetizer, then goes and destroys the last family member you have left. The one where you wake up after three days ready to eat an entire herd of elk.

The third death— that's the one happening now.

This is the orchestrated death.

The one you plan.

You're in the middle of the 101 at 3:42 am. You've taken off your shirt and one sock. You've fucked up your hair. You've wandered aimlessly around the edge of town, stopping at random intervals, staring off into space. Standing slumped in the middle of the Calawa bridge, hoping to draw attention to yourself.

This is when Newton shows up.

He always has spectacularly shitty timing, and if this had been any other sleepwalk, he would have been about an hour too late to stop you from getting naked. Any other night, he would have been right on time to watch you strip off your pants and continue on your merry, sleeping way.

"'Sup, Swan." He rolls his window down and winks at you and keeps on chewing that disgusting wad of gum, but you can't let your gut instinct kick in. Used to be that gut instinct meant some sarcastic remark and an eye roll. Now it means you have to bite your tongue in half to keep from jumping in through his window to snap his neck or maybe rip out all of his guts in a fit of rage. But you keep walking instead. Face limp. Arms limp. Feet limp. Everything is a shuffle, a drag, a heavy blink.

You're supposed to be asleep, remember?

"What the fuck are you doing out here, kid?" Newton asks, shaking his head at you. "You're totally asleep, aren't you?" He sounds chock-full of awe. Like he can't believe his luck. He leans on his window and leers at you, your naked stomach and your bra and the waistband of your too-big sweats hanging precariously from your hips. "Damn, kid. I'd love to get a look at the rest of you. Go on, and take it all off, huh?"

You keep walking. Slow. Steady. Imagining a hundred different ways to kill the bastard but reminding yourself each time why you can't do that.

"You know what I wish sometimes, Swan?" Newton just keeps talking, even though he's well beyond the point of reason. He rolls the cruiser along beside you, so slow the odometer doesn't even register. "I wish me and you could've made it. Like, fucked in the cell block or on your dad's desk or something. Fast and furious, you know?"

He peers at you, a sudden thought dawning across his face. "You ever been fucked before, Swan? Or are you a virgin? Because shit, that would be something now, wouldn't it? God, I bet you are. Bet you're just new and tight and—"

He's twelve miles away, waiting for you, but you can literally feel Edward bristle with rage.

"You know, I used to sit up at night thinking 'bout you. Wanting to get my dick into you so bad, but your old man would've killed me. But now that he's gone…"

That's when he does it. Totally crosses the line. Undoes his belt and digs out his dick and spits into his palm with his eyes fucking literally every single inch of your body.

You can't take it for a single second longer.

You're gonna wish, you're gonna wish so hard for the rest of your thousand years of existence, that you could have seen the look on Newton's face when you suddenly veer to the right and tip yourself right over the guardrail, off the edge of Calawa bridge.

 **Sincerely,**

 **Yourself**

* * *

"That was pretty damn convincing. You should be an actress."

Edward is smiling when I pull myself out of the water, just as pale and cold as a drowning victim. I shake the water off and look upstream. I floated for three miles before I saw him standing on the bank, waiting for me.

The town is so quiet this time of night, so peacefully sleeping, it's almost hard to reconcile what we're doing. It feels as though nothing bad could ever happen here, a bubble in the middle of hell, untouchable in the face of tragedy. The doves aren't up yet, and the elk are huddled asleep at the far end of the grass, but I don't even care about their heartbeats right now. I don't care about their musty blood pumping slow and soft and steady through their veins as they sleep. I don't care about the kids in their beds half a block away or miserable Matthew Blanchard, wandering back to his shithole trailer after his nightly post at the bar.

In a matter of hours, my name will be on every tongue in town.

I wonder how far they'll drag the river. Wonder how far they'll send the dogs down the banks. Wonder if Newton will ever 'fess up to his buddies that he was ready to jack off to the sight of half-naked Bella Swan just before she slept her ass right off the bridge. I wonder if they'll hold a ceremony for me when they give up on finding my body, or if they'll all just be grateful that the last remnants of the tragedy that was the Swan family are now out of sight and out of mind.

I wonder if anyone will ever tell my mother.

I wanted Alice, to barter or beg, or even just flat out steal her from Laurent, but Edward forbade me to act. In fact, he was pretty specific about not making any sort of reference to her at all.

"If he knows she was ours, the hell we'll have to pay will be the stuff of nightmares, Bella."

"What is he going to do with her?"

"He'll keep her for a few decades until he gets tired of the memory."

"Like a fucking trophy?"

"Exactly."

"That's sick, Edward." I gulp down something that feels like my stomach. "It's so wrong."

"Humans hang their kills on their walls." Edward's eyebrow rises slowly, and all I can think about are the fish dipped in plastic my dad had hanging in the living room. "Be grateful he doesn't have a home with a wall to mount her on."

This is the moment where, if I was still human, I'd throw up. Black out. Scream out loud. I can feel it, the long-ago remnants of the bodily reaction to such an idea, but they're faded and dull. Instead, I'm covered in a full-body itch that feels something like my skin peeling off.

"What are you thinking, your face is so—"

"Are you going to keep me hostage for a decade? Like Tanya?" I interrupt him, not even caring what my face could possibly look like.

Edward sighs and runs a hand through his hair, his face drawn. "Laurent and I are from opposite ends of the spectrum, Bella. I would never."

"What he's doing to her is sick." My mouth tastes like shit just saying it. I wish I could bleach out my brain.

Edward nods. "He is an animal. He always has been."

"Did he keep _you_?"

"Yes." Edward nods with his face pinched in such a way I dread asking exactly what that meant.

"Do I want to know?"

"No." He answers short and rough and shakes his head.

"Am I your first?"

Edward shakes his head. "I wasn't always so mild. There was a time when I relished in the turning… Lived for it, even."

"So, I'm nothing but a conquest. Another turn for you."

"That is quite literally as far from the truth as you could possibly get." Edward shakes his head. "Isn't it obvious yet? I can't be so subtle that you haven't noticed."

"Noticed what?"

"I want you be my… " He falters, glaring at me for a moment before glancing away and grumbling under his breath. He shakes his head once, twice.

"Your what?" I repeat.

"Inamorata," he says, still staring off at the trees.

"I don't speak that language, whatever it is. English, please."

"A sweetheart. _My_ sweetheart."

"I don't want that." I shake my head.

"You don't?" His brow furrows, and his eyes tinge curious around the hurt.

"No. I don't want to be someone's _sweetheart_." I spit the word like it tastes of rotten fish. "I don't want to be their girl, or their lover, or their wife.

"What do you want to be, then?"

"The love of their entire, miserable life," I sigh.

We stand there on the riverbank for what feels like a millisecond but is probably hours. Time is all fucked up now, a slow-down warp speed I still haven't figured out how to deal with. Shadows start to form as the sun rises, birdsong starting tentative and soft. My clothes have long since dried, and my hair is only damp at the very ends. I can hear the search team far upstream, the dogs and the shouting and the trampling of bushes. They're so far away, underestimating the river currents, looking for me tangled up in the trees, face down in the shallows, shivering on the muddy river bank. They're still hoping for the best, ambulance on call, but they're about to be sorely disappointed.

"You terrify me, you know?" Edward muses soft and calm, still not looking at me. He hunches down by the water and stares at the ripples lapping the stones at our feet.

"I'm not the scary one here." I shake my head.

"You are. You've made me question everything. I was fine, before you. Miserable, but fine. Now I'm wondering if I wasted a century, if I'm not as hard as I thought I was." He glances up at me, eyes thoughtful, forehead creased. "I am the rock, and you are the water."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"You've carved a canyon right through me. Impossible, but true."

"What was impossible?"

Edward stands, his eyes pinched, the hard line of his mouth breaking as it falls lopsided into an easy grin. His feet overtake the small distance left between us.

"I love you," he exhales. "I didn't think I'd love anything ever again, but it's true."

I stare at him. A blank stare, which is about all I can manage. If my heart still worked, it would be hammering hard enough to break my ribs. If my lungs still worked, I'd be choking on not enough air and way too many words. If my blood still ran, it would be racing. I'm cold, freezing all over, except for a small spark of something a million degrees warm nestled right behind my silent heart.

Edward's face falls. "You don't have to say it back. I just need you to know." He shrugs and turns away.

"Are you fucking with me?" I ask.

He shakes his head.

"Never."

* * *

 **THE END**

* * *

 **AN:**

 **I know, I know - you're thinking WHAT? The END? She cannot be serious…**

 **Rarely do I kid.**

 **There will be an epilogue posted tomorrow.**

 **Once again, as always, all of my gratitude is owed to Hadley Hemingway. She continues to hold my hand when I am a mess, grammatically and literally, which is basically all of the time.**

 **This is dedicated to Small Bee who was a sleepy newborn when I began the research for this story, and is currently a tiny terror with ravioli in his ear, crawling up my legs of search of attention.**

 **Thanks for following me deep into the abyss, fandom.**

 **It's been fun.**

 **XO**

 **HBM**


	31. Chapter 31

**Epilogue**

A few things about your life as a vampire.

Some things you know now. Some things you don't. Yet.

But you will.

 **One**

In ten years, no one in your sad, small town will even remember the Swans or the three years of tragedy that brought them to a slow, excruciating end. Your house will be sold, torn down, rebuilt, moved into by a family of six with a dog and a cat and not a care in the world. Your mother will become gossip fodder, whispered about in knitting circles and PTA meetings. Your father will become a cautionary tale, his photo forever staring down the police department as a reminder of just how low a public servant can sink before anyone bothers to notice. You will haunt your high school hallways, the stories worse every year, until Peggy Whitehead launches her car through the front windows of the diner and kills six patrons, stealing all of your thunder. Alice will become a real-life horror story, passed on by mothers who need to scare their children into minding their curfews. By older siblings wanting to install nightmares into the bedtime routines of the younger ones. By worn-down cops warning rookies that death and destruction visit even the quietest corners of the world, often when you are least expecting it.

Mike Newton will die of a heart attack six months after you leave, his coke habit finally catching him unaware. Matthew Blanchard will live to see 103, pickling himself from the inside out with liquor and that loyal kind of love only dogs can give you. Your father's beloved police force will come under scrutiny for ignoring a drug ring based out of the high school. Your classmates will go on to have babies, car accidents, mortgages, and cancer. Your hometown will succumb to the fallout of the timber market— the logging mills will pull out, handing out last paychecks and false concern for the people whose lives they have destroyed, the forests they have flattened, the equipment they have abandoned.

The remnants of your life will fade away just as surely as a distant memory. The world will slip by slowly, so slowly it's hard for you to even notice, only reminded by the people you once knew, the places you once knew, succumbing to the ravages of time.

 **Two**

It will take you a year to tell Edward you love him. It's not that you spend the entire time unsure of it—you're actually more certain of that singular small fact than you have ever been about anything else in your entire existence. It takes a year because thoughts are fickle, and your heart is a stone, and you're still trying to decide if you want him to love you or just fuck you silly.

Maybe both.

But you know it's real. Real no matter what you say or how you say it. No matter the when or the where or the why. No matter the awkward jumble of words you use, everything coming out stilted and painful because just about everyone you've ever loved in your life has left in some horrible, sudden way, and you're frankly kind of freaked out about the entire thing. You'll be sure you've just fucked everything up because you sound like you're asking yourself a question, rather than stating a fact. Because your declaration will sound more like a plea, rather than a reveal. Because your fear still overrides nearly any other emotion you have, and this is scary as shit, all told. Because there's a great possibility that he might totally eviscerate your heart.

And he does just that. Breaks your heart once and for all.

Your solid, stoic vampire crumbles right before your eyes, blood running down his cheeks instead of tears.

 **Three**

Your teeth will hurt when you look at him. Your fangs, actually. Just like that ache you used to get when you ate something too sweet, too fast. A rush of blood to your head and a throb in your mouth that will remind you faintly of your heartbeat. When he smiles at you from across a room, through the sun, under the stars, you'll feel the faint phantom pain of your heart sputtering a death twitch under your ribs.

 **Four**

You know what's awesome?

Sex.

Know what's even more awesome?

Vampire sex.

 **Five**

There's a part of Edward that isn't apparent to the naked eye. But once you've gotten him naked, bare, down to just skin and bones and more skin, it becomes pretty obvious that the guy isn't just a daydream. Sex isn't just sex. It's his broken bits rubbing rough and raw and hard and soft and fast and slow against all of your broken bits, and the friction is the stuff volcanos are made of. The heat is the stuff of legends. You have holes, and he has everything you'll ever need to not feel so empty. He's got walls, but you are about as subtle as a rusted shovel, and in four months, he's going to crack a smile while he's hovering over you, pushing into you.

It will be the first time you know for certain that smile is real.

 **Six**

You will make out in a jungle somewhere in Vietnam, a freezing cold-burning hot vampire boy pressing you into the leaves, his mouth everywhere, his hands everywhere else. You will make love on a beach in South America, fifty miles from civilization, something soft and slow that makes you ache in a long overdue way for your humanity and his. You will fuck each other in a hotel room in Paris, the air a snowfall of feathers from the demise of the pillows he pressed you into, taking each other hard and rough and just mean enough to remind you that both of you are not exactly human. You will marry him on the top of a mountain, waist deep in snow, burning behind your ribs when you declare your love to the sky and the sun and the birds flying far below you. You will sleep through the sunlight, wrapped up in one another, hidden away, and then spend your nights in dive bars, in alleyways, on rooftops, fingers never far off, minds always twined around the other, the faceless crowds and the sleeping cities simple backdrops in this play production you've come to call your life.

With him.

 **Seven**

You will not go into this vampire thing with expectations. Mostly because you don't know what to expect. Instead, you will learn to become easy. To become open. To become moveable and moldable and flexible in ways you could have never been in your past life. Your human self was bitter, hurting, vulnerable—she was built to expect the worst and lived her life in a state of constant torment. She was angry, her blood boiled down thick with rage and loneliness. She was walls, only walls, but her house was hollow.

You will learn to love the sunrise, even as it chases you indoors. You will learn to love the heat, the cold, the wind, and the rain, even though you can't feel any of it anywhere but deep inside your silent heart. You will learn to love the feel of what you now call sleep, even though it's not sleep at all and more like a conscious stilling of your thoughts. You will learn to love blood, love it in a way you didn't think was possible, but every time you drink, you imagine yourself wading out of an endless wasteland desert, your thirst quenched by cool, clean water. You will learn to love books, the simple act of reading for enjoyment, reading without research. You will learn to love nighttime—the dark, the chill, the quiet. You will learn to love a boy who never changes, yet somehow is never quite the same.

You will learn to love yourself again—probably the most important lesson of all.

 **Eight**

You will spend fifty years in Paris. You will spend another fifty in India. Fifty in Brazil. Fifty in Melbourne. Fifty on an island in the South Pacific with no name. Your life will become a revolving cycle of half-century increments, your pretty face and your bright eyes and your ever-smooth skin going unnoticed just long enough for you to really put down your feet down, then you'll have to uproot again.

You're going to experience the world, one place at a time, one life at a time. You're going to experience a life, or what seems like a decent summation of it, one drink, one dance, one fuck, one fight, one midnight moonlit walk on the beach, one warm water float, one daydream, one nightmare, one kiss at a time.

You're going to do it with him.

* * *

 **AN:**

 **Hadley - darling - I love you. Thank you for your hours of editing, research, and therapy.**

 **Readers - I like you lots. Thank you for reading along.**

 **XO**

 **HBM**


End file.
